'04 IS300 - Project (Not Really) Nice Daily

[SlimKlim]

Car looks awesome!

Basically, the kit gives you a bottle of paint, and a bottle of "Sealact" blending solution that seals the paint in the chip, and removes any excess. The instructions say to place a blob of paint next to a big chip or group of smaller ones, and smear it across with your thumb. This looks like absolute shit of course, and after a dozen or so chips your hood is covered in smeared, drying paint. But not to worry! After "a few minutes, up to 1 hour", you are meant to dampen a small portion of the included towel with the blending solution, and with "light pressure - let the solution do the work", you wipe away the excess paint. Well......no. After no more than 4-5 minutes, I had to desperately scrub away with a soaked towel (numerous times) to clear the smudges. This ferocity then took the paint out of some of the bigger chips, so I just used a very fine applicator brush to touch them up directly and gave up on the Sealact after a while. I didn't want to imagine trying to do this near the 1-hour mark, but I'd still recommend it as it works great for little groups of chips (easy to knock them out with one thumb-smear) and you can focus on the bigger ones individually.

Paint. Pens.

http://www.automotivetouchup.com/paintpen.asp

In my semi-professional opinion this is the only at-home touch up product worth screwing around with. To be fair, I haven't tried one of those Dr. Color Chip kits but it seems like more fuss than it's worth.

With these paint pens you shake the shit out of them, get a bit of paint flowing into the tip, then just dab it into the chip. If it's a deep chip do a couple "coats" before hitting it with the clear, and a lot of times you can get it built back up to the level of the paint and it's extremely hard to spot without any more fussing.

If you are anal enough to try and get a perfectly smooth result with a touch-up (seems like a somewhat doomed mission IMO) you can build the clearcoat up past the original paint, let it dry for a few hours and then hit it with some rubbing compound before it cures too much, or if you're brave you could wetsand then polish.

However, for small, run of the mill rock chips, just dabbing some color and clear in using a pen is all you need to get a decent result.

I wish i could find a single stage touch up pen, that's the one thing I don't like about the commercially available pens. Back in the day I'd mix myself up some color, go ahead and throw my clear, reducer and hardener right in with the paint, put it in a pen and rock out. Much easier to just fill the chip in in one go than go back over soft basecoat with a clearcoat pen.