Best Paint Touch-up Tricks: Mercedes G55

what's up guys today I'm working on the 2013 G 55 wagon and as you can tell it's black this is a beautiful 5.5 liter v8 putting out about 382 horsepower now the interesting thing about the G Wagon is it hasn't really changed its appearance in 23 years the exterior appearance because it has an iconic image if you will and I think it looks pretty good now the reason why I've been called out here today is for one of my biggest pet peeves one of my it's even more than that it's something that just crosses a line and makes me furious and that is it's about a nine-foot key scratch all the way down the side of the car now I definitely know why or how this happened I guess you should say is it wasn't like we were going through the back or the owner of the car wasn't going through some big mountains and trees and the whole nine yards and a tree caught it that would be annoying but acceptable this was parked in a parking lot for you know lunch or dinner or what-have-you and somebody came out and clearly keyed it and I can actually see some marks and we'll pull the camera in there's something about that that just doesn't sit with me right as I'm sure you can imagine and it just really irritates me so as a car guy I'm sure all of this sort of feeling can resonate so today we're going to talk about how to repair this and some of the thought process that goes into it now in this particular case we're going to talk about a few different things and one of them is this would normally need to be repainted the entire pound the problem is it's multiple panels which is more complicated and there's these middle sections here they have to take out it's a complicated repaint and extremely expensive so we're going to take a shot at trying to repair it today that's all coming up today on this episode right along as you can see we pulled the car inside now before I did that I actually did a few things to make my life easier when I'm done with the process first thing was I cleaned the wheels I washed the car now on the scratch itself as I was washing it and soaping it down I actually did a little bit of clang and the reason why I did that is a little bit of forethought I was thinking ahead of time knowing that I'm gonna have to polish this with a three-inch rupes polisher and when I do that I didn't want to have any issues in terms of contamination sticking up and having my pad going there it's just smart took 30 seconds to do and I wanted to wash everything down because when I present the car back to the owner I don't want to have to redo everything and touch everything I kind of want to just keep this area sensitive so I'll vacuum and whatnot but I figured hey why don't we do the wash beforehand so that's something you might want to keep keep in mind okay after that dried it down I want to make sure that I use the air compressor because you really don't want the air you don't need water excuse me flowing all over the things that you're doing especially in the crack and this particular car much like a Hummer one of the h1 Hummers or even an h2 Hummer there's all these little intricacies that water gets trapped in so make sure you use compressed air after was completely dry I started setting up my my drop cloth there and the reason why I did that is there's rubber on the actual car these if you if you know the g550 there's these these little rubber parts I'll take an up-close picture of it and they react weird - you know waxes and things of that nature it's just like molding but it's in kind of in a funky area it's right in the middle of the door so sort of my plus - what I like to do is think hey how long is it gonna take me to cover this and how much is it cost cost me four dollars and took me ten minutes based on the price of the car 120 hundred thirty thousand whatever they you know around that price sometimes you gotta use your head and say for ten minutes I'm just going to avoid any problems I don't want anything dripping down here I just it's gonna make my life easier so this is what I did is it overkill maybe a little bit but I think that's why customer like this might want someone like me working on the car because I'll have a little bit more protection here so spend ten minutes be smart about after that the next step that you want to do is you want to do 91% isopropanol to clean it out now I envision this like this with a scratch in this nature or this you know kind of depth it's almost like getting a cut on your skin the first thing you want to do is clean it out and a lot of times not necessarily with alcohol but you know you want to put some you know things that will clean the cut out when you go to the emergency room let's say in this case you're gonna take all the oils and all the gunk and everything out of it so that all of our new things can stick to it like bondo so we're going to talk more about some of the steps that I did but I worked on the back just because I wanted to see how it would you know how was working out and we'll go over some of the intricacies and the tips but it's it's going pretty good this is a two day process and I'll bring the camera in and show you how to do this middle panel with a bit of bondo now the techniques I'm showing you today I actually learned from a dear friend of mine Richard Lane he is the master at touching cars up and he it just does it so it looks absolutely perfect so I've been on the phone with him back and forth he's been helping me out because I'm just always like really interested in hearing how other people think about things perceive things and how they actually do it so a big shout out to him thanks for doing that but one of the things that we talked about is we were debating whether to wet sand first and right off the bat you hear that it's pretty deep so any chance of wet sanding it out is not really an option but the second thing is when a key mark like this or a scratch or whatever the item was that impacted the paint if it's kind of a jagged edge what's gonna happen is there's gonna be a scratch right this is gonna be the V of the scratch but on top of it there's gonna be all these little spikes that sometimes can happen and you can feel that by running your hand across it with a glove on or without you'll be able to feel like this like your glove will be catching a little bit and you can almost hear it in this case it's we don't have that so in the beginning I was thinking before I arrived here maybe I'll have to wet sand it with mm just to kind of clean out the edges and if you remember from the video I did where there was a symbol on the hood I actually had to do that because the edges were really rough and the way that I found that out was one you can feel it but the two because I'm you know a nerd and then saying I put a microscope on there because I could see I you know got really close I could see the edges and there wasn't anything sticking up so what's the point of the story normally I guess I wouldn't say normally but on some occasions I will have to wet sand this down just to make a flat surface just so the the paintbrush and the bondo and all the things that we're doing the polishing doesn't catch in the things sticking up the paint sticking up or the key mark or whatever it is sticking up so we skip that step now what I what I did after that knowing that I don't have to do that is is the isopropanol clean it all out and now it's ready dry and clean for bondo on Richards suggestion and I left these out here these are old as I taped around the scratch and I taped very very very close in fact I took a little microscope shot of it and I'll show you how close the tape was to the actual scratch and the reason why I did that was I didn't want any overflow either by sanding which we didn't do but if I were to sand it and make it so there wasn't any space extra or or overlap if you will and then the other part was I had to put bondo in there we're gonna do the bondo trick and I'll speak more about that on this side I just wanna show you you know Stage one it looks much better but if you get up close you can see there's a bunch of bumps and ridges which is okay because I'm letting it dry we're gonna sand it later but the reason that makes it so difficult and kind of a challenge and why this this is a this is a really hard one to do for multiple reasons because it's so deep because the cars really expensive and because of this plastic I have no room to get in here so I really needed to tape up the entire thing and see if I could test it now there for the record here there's there's no right way to do this there's only multiple options and you have to pick and choose and right now with you know sort of roll the decks of all the things that I've done and I have Richard Lynn on my shoulder helping me I'm trying to pick and choose what's gonna fit that so I may not use the tape technique so I'm going to show you with no tape over here the bondo trick and we're gonna just kinda get it in the get in the hole to fill in that hole so now it's gonna fill it up and then on top of that later on like I did here I'm gonna put touch-up paint that's gonna be a crown on top of it and then tomorrow once the salt dries I'm gonna come back sand it and polish it and do do those steps so that's the two-day process and the day that you're waiting is all based on drying the paint now ideally you'd like to have a heat lamp on there I don't have it here because I actually traveled very far to get here and it's kind of hard to put one of those in a car and so I didn't do that you have to kind of you use the tools that you have so I jacked up the heat in here so it's nice and warm I have a big lamp here it's about 85 degrees in here it'll sit overnight I'll put a light even closer so we should be okay in terms of the cure time so let's do the bondo trick and show you what bondo is all about all right the trick that I learned from Richard is to actually use a bit of bondo now this is bondo glazing and spot putty by 3m then you're gonna open it up now what I'm using here it's just a plastic squeegee so it can bend super-safe not gonna do any scratching so what I do is put a little bit on the edge here like such I'm just gonna do this little area just cuz it's on camera and I just like to fill it in all right it's gonna be a little bit messy right fill it in kind of like spackling you ever spackle a room same sort of thing the goal of what you're trying to do is level off the scratch itself remember the scratch has a is a big hole so right now I'm trying to fill it in with all the putty and and bondo dries really fast so it's not like you have to wait overnight so you got to be a little bit quick about it so what I'm doing right now is I'm just filling it up now ideally you want to you'd want to fill it up to the top so here's the scratch again you want to fill it up to the top and ideally you'd leave a little bit of a space so that you can put a good crown of touch our paint on there take this coming off your edge get there and luckily you know with this you're not scratching anything because it's it's already drying fast so it's a it's a constant game you're playing here of taking excess off but not taking too much off well you're not you know you're not filling in the hole itself so I'll have a good 10 15 20 minutes depending on how smooth this goes of filling this filling this little hole in this is kind of where the you know the craft or the artistry comes in because you're really just filling it in now normally you would just put touch-up paint Shh put touch-up paint but then as you fill it in and you put the crown it starts to sink and then goes below and then that's when you see the bump and if you go to sand it doesn't really matter because there's still a hole there and if you're standing on top of it there's still a hole so that's why you always want to put a bit of a bubble but that takes a lot of drawing and back and forth and back and forward drying put it on try and put it on so if it takes overnight just to let that dry that's kind of the the catch here is that if you do it wrong you gotta wait another night so that's what you could spend weeks and weeks or weeks doing this so bondo kind of shortens that by filling in that gap and then on top of it you can just put a nice layer of protection ie paint so I'm gonna keep doing this and I'll film a little bit and I'll show you what the next step is because it's you don't want to leave it all gummed up like this now after you've taken a few minutes and filled in that hole or the scratch again this is the certain technique that you would use with bondo sometimes people just want to put touch-up paint and that's cool too we're just talking about the bondo step we're gonna do is take a little bit of leveler basically something that's going to pull off all the remaining stuff now this is where it sort of gets a little bit tricky where you kind of have to have a good eye and good hand you want to take off the bad stuff meaning the things that are on there regular paint the paint that's not scratched but you don't want to take off too much you don't want to take out anything that's in the actual hole or the scratch so if you do too much you got to go back and put it back in so it's like you kind of have to have a little bit of a technique and a little bit of hand coordination here to get it so you see out right now it's only right up to that scratch so now I got to work from the from the top down and sometimes I could be a little more challenging because you can't see but so I'm gonna do this this is probably take another 10 15 minutes to get it perfect and that's all you should really see is one red line which is kind of cool the thing here that I wanted to show that as I was doing this I said I gotta get on a camera as I did not tape it off like I did the last one I mean like tape right to the edge the whole way and the reason why like I said before as I was really close to this rubber and what that means is when I come in here with us when I come in here with the three-inch roofs I'm not gonna be able to get close it I can only get so close and I won't be able to spin and remember in all our of our videos if the pad isn't spinning you're not actually cutting so if I'm hitting this rubber and just shaking I'm not gonna be able to do anything that's why I taped it off so when I was using my my squeegee going back you'll see there's little scratches here but for someone who's taking on a job like this these little scratches mean nothing meaning it take me five seconds to get those out that's that's not a big deal but I just wanted to make the point that if I did tape all this off it is a little sometimes weird to work over the tape but I wouldn't have these little residual scratches so plus - it's really up to you guys again all my videos are not hey do it this way do it that way I just want to show people this is one way that that is done and then you know not every car is a g550 wagon with a huge scratch maybe it's a maybe it's a you know a different kind of car with harder paint softer paint different color but just to get your mind thinking a little bit so let me spend a few minutes on this and I'll turn the camera back on and show you hopefully just one redline that we're gonna let dry and then I'll go on to the next one and next step after that touch it up when you're done removing the excess fondo it should look like one line in the shape or the form of the scratch so what happened is when you have the scratch we've filled it up we fill up all the way probably not you want to you know try to stay away from putting a crown on it with the bondo and the reason why is you want to be able to fill up just a little bit maybe seventy or eight or maybe the other thirty percent meaning 70 percent is the bond and there the 30% would be the paint something like that where it actually builds a crown so that we can polish this whole area out because of the little fine scratches that we put in when we were manipulating the bondo to get into the crack so this is what it should look like after the leveler stage all right the next you want to do is prepare your pink to go on top of the bondo and what I have here is I'm actually using applied colors my friends out there and on the west coast and then what I do is you can take the color and give these little pipettes basically what you want to do is get about 80% of the paint right to about 20% of the shine and I'll show you what the inside of that looks like in a second and then I take shine which comes in a little kit and you about 20% of that right so put that to the side I'm gonna take my paintbrush mix it in there give it a second and you should be good to go to put on there or if you go to your Mercedes dealerships or Audi or Ford or whatever car is that you have this was 16 bucks that's a touch-up and it comes with a little paintbrush now probably won't use the paintbrush depending on how big it is but there are some big scratches here work it's frightening that I could actually use this which is a little bit of a Detailers choke meaning even if it's that big that's a serious scratch but what I do is I can hold it in my hand like this I think I showed you this on the on that other video and then I take my tiny little that's a little paintbrush called tiny that is alright you like that and then I'll go in there and paint that but I'll show you how to do that right now I just want to show you that there was a bit of a prep process with regards to getting the paint ready so paint looks ready tom touch-up well if you thought the first part was tedious this is where it really starts to get crazy take your little paintbrush I'm just doing this area just because it's on camera you're gonna lightly fill in this gap here you know takes a lot of patience it's okay if it's not a Picasso right off the bat because the goal is to put a little crown on it now I've said this in the last video you don't really want a paint you want to kind of push and get it to fill in see it's starting to fill in there because the more you start to paint the more lines are created in the Connaught isn't look hard I could but Richard is a good guy to ask about a lot of these things those little nuances but anyways you're gonna go in here and fill this up the best you can and then let it dry and we're gonna sand it down but you'll see you'll see it takes time but it's fun alright I've been working on this for a few hours and I got the middle panel on the back paddle done and I have to still do the front now I wanted to you can see from here you know it looks pretty good but again that's four or five feet away so we call that a six footer beam it looks good from six foot and I'm sure hopefully you can still see some scratches over there so yeah it looks pretty good but I'm gonna get up grab the camera real time and show you what's going on going on here there's a few nuances luckily I got to chat with Richard Lynn again and he sort of given me a good perspective on what it should look like in this particular stage now before I filmed it it was a little rocky meaning it looked a little mountainous so a little some parts are forward deeper than others and there was the mound's and I knew if I wet sanded and went right over it the the middle part is not going to be wet sand and I'm just gonna heavily take down the sides which would probably expose a little bit of the bondo and now the big trick to this or the pain in the butt part is if you level this or sand it or basically remove all the gunk that's in there the extra paint and not the part that's not in the actual scratch that is what could cause it to go day after day after day because tonight I have to let this dry but if I come in here make a mistake bang and too much bondo comes out in theory you have to wait another day so this is where it starts to get tricky and more Tiye so I've spent a few hours on this because I wanted to fill it in but let me grab the camera and show you what I've done I've really built up this edge and it it's important because I was struggling with hey what's how much is enough so it's a it's a lot of going back and forth and looking at it so let me grab it real quick now before we took that picture it was a little rocky now as you can see you see it's a little more bulbous if you will this spot right here I gotta put more there I got to go back and do that see it's a little in-between see it goes down a little bit in between there but something like this see how it's see how it's up there's a camera there you go see how it's a little bit higher it's so it's a mountain instead of a valley see a little bit mountainous so what I'm gonna do is originally I was gonna sand it where's that low spot see that low spot right there so this is this is the key to understanding everything this low spot right there right where my shadow is right now see it right there so right here I have to put a little bit more touch up on there to build it up to look more like that see it's a little bit pushed up in the middle that's good because you're gonna sand that down now when I spoke to Richard so I'll keep going and chatting about it when I spoke to Richard he mentioned that we should use the leveler that came with ally and I haven't I've never used that before so I'm excited to try that and you have to have a nice little touch you have to kind of move with it well we'll talk about that tomorrow in the morning and see how good it comes out but in the past I've always just wet sanded this with 2,000 or 3,000 grit really easily really softly just to get the extra like this excess and then the top access but not in the middle and then I'll just show you for perspective that's what the scratch look like before you know you know the rest of the car that I have to do so anyways that's the stage we're at right now this is going to dry overnight I have to do this other part off-camera and I'll come back in the morning and show you the leveler or if I in the middle of night wake up with another genius it's a fight tea or something to do it with mm and maybe I'll do it that way but we'll find out tomorrow and then I'll show you the after shot alright we're back on day 2 now last night I finished at about 8:30 at night and I wanted to give it 10 12 it'd be great if it was 15 hours but now it's about 8:30 in the morning it is a bit damp there's fog rolling in it was beautiful for but the humidity is something I have to keep in mind something that you need to think about to where you are in the country or in the world that's a factor so I would have loved to have the heat lamps on here to help cure this a little bit faster but we're working on it now now what I did off-camera just a few minutes ago is I wanted to test out the leveler so we have two different approaches you can do the leveler approach meaning with the liquid that actually comes from applied colors so I tried that it actually works pretty good but you really need to have a steady hand because if you wipe too much and I'll pull the camera and show you that you'll expose the bondo again now if you remember yesterday I put some tape all along here along the lines curvature lens advice I and then I did that and I said maybe I'll try it this way this whole experience remember normally we're taking out these tiny little rock chips or these little things this long this is a this is an experiment i I knew it was gonna be not perfect but it can be much better I didn't know what the level of much better it was gonna be so Richard Lynn's advice was to put the piece of tape and now looking back I probably should have taped the whole thing off it would have made it a little bit cleaner more tedious but probably cleaner so the other option is I can sand it and over here I stained it a little bit down and I basically took off a little bit of the ridges or the you know the touch up marks so I'm playing back and forth and I want to show you the two different options again there is no right or wrong answer it depends on the humidity outside the color to make that how hard the pain is how long you let it cure there's multiple factors again this isn't the perfect way to do it I wanted to capture this on camera to show everybody hey these are different options these are the things you need to think about but it's almost impossible for me to show you this is the correct way to put that I can't there's no way to do that so I thought it'd be a fun experiment to kind of walk you through and kind of put you in my brain as to how I'm thinking and approaching these things so let's take the leveller approach first and I'll show you what it looks like on the side now the first approach is to use the leveler you're gonna put it on here and the big thing is you have a nice clean cloth you don't want to put too much on there and you're literally just going to lightly dab and kind of pick off the areas that are not in the scratch and you'll see the paint will start to come off but the downside is you have to be really careful because once you take it off it's off see I just I think I may have gone a little thin there and what's gonna happen is you're gonna pull some of the black paint off but how do you know how much to push well I guess that comes with experience and figure it out I'm not trying to pretend that I know how much to push because it's it's kind of different every time so you'll see you see some of the black paint coming off it's a it's a game going back and forth to figure out how much you're taking off so it's another way of let's say sanding it down which will be option number two so you put a little bit on there once you first put a little tip here once you first put it on it's gonna be a little bit more aggressive in the beginning and that obviously makes sense because it's fresh at that point and you want to keep rotating you want to keep rotating the towel so because once it gets full it's not gonna pick up anymore because it's because it's already full the black stuffs there so you go move a little bit here you don't want to go too crazy you don't put too much on there and you're just gonna have it's just you're sort of massaging the paint here and kind of just barely I sometimes equated and you know seminars and things of its like archaeology you're just you don't want to damage the bone the thing that you're trying to get you're just China you know move away a little bit of the dirt or whatever so that's that sort of mentality this is this is the leveler step and this is what applied colors recommends and I can see it being very successful two separate ways and this is me going through this thought process as I would have loved to have left the tape on there so if you have a rock chip or a tiny little scratch leave tape on the I mean right on the edge fill it up with the colors that are supplied or your touch-up paint let it sit there and let it cure overnight then come back pull the tape off and then lightly do this and just clean up the little areas around there it it should work pretty pretty well for you this I mean if we wanted a perfect clearly we would just repaint it but we're getting it it just takes time all right option two is to actually sand the area with 2,000 2,500 3,000 somewhere in that area again you have to you know use your judgment you remember in one of the drive cleaning videos we actually use the pencil top and we came in there and we used the pencil but that was for a rock chip member tiny little area that was the surface of this you know tiny this again is huge so not gonna be really a good option for us is right now I'm just starting off with 3000 grit which is almost next to nothing very easy to get out and I'm using a bit of spray wax I just want to test so we're gonna put it in here I've had put it on the edge you got a sanding block in there very soft right I'm just gonna kind of level this down just a little bit and you're just gonna have to play and figure out how far you can go is it working do you need to go with a stronger or heavier grit should I go 2500 should I go 2,000 it all depends on how long the cure time was so and I'm going a little bit against the grain to see if I can you know whittle down those little mountainous edges now one of the reasons why I didn't stand over here is I just didn't have any room to get the sandpaper in and if I did I wouldn't have enough room to get the rupes polisher in here afterwards so I was kind of fun experiment to play with both sides and sometimes you have to use two different options but I cannot reiterate just showing you multiple options and things you can do but I will agree that on a small chip and not a gargantuan one like this the actual technique or method that the applied colors guys say to do probably is the best approach and that is fill it up with the supplied material let it dry and then use the leveler to take it off so this is sort of whittled down let me pull the camera in and I'll show you I mean there's scratch mark because obviously we're sanding but you'll see that that the top ridges have been whittled down and now it's just a matter of how far do I go without taking out the paint that that's kind of this this game here that makes it very technical when you make a mistake you have to go back and restart it again so that's that's sort of the consequence of doing only polar camera before compounding with the rupee's three inch pneumatic polisher I wanted to try blending the surrounding area with a five thousand grit disc and interface on the grows Garage three inch because a lot of power wasn't needed in this particular case after much sanding you can see the touch-up has begun the level off with the surrounding paint thereby making it less obvious next I use the rupee's 3 inch polisher along with the three inch McGuire's cutting disc which makes quick work of the five thousand grit notice however we are still slightly removing black touch-up on the pad so be careful not to overdo it lastly polish the panel for a perfect blend alright guys after a few more hours today I'm pretty much finished now I think the car turned in into what we call a 6-footer to about I don't know a two-footer or three footer so it's still there if you get your face up close you can still see it but way way better and I think it's within the range of acceptability in terms of you know talking to the customer or the client the person who owns it and measuring the level of hey it's not going to be perfect it's gonna be really really great but not not perfect you want to perfect you have to get it repainted so I think with that understanding this looks pretty good more importantly it's protected it's not going to rust now all the options that we did we did option one which was using bondo because there was lots of different levels meaning deep gouges here then a little bit of a gouge of the deep gouge so there's a lot of depth difference and when it's really deep sometimes you want to use bondo so I did that into some cases and then we just did we also did the wet sanding technique versus just using the leveler and then the other the third technique was just to goop it in the hole with the supplied material from from allied and then remove it with leveler so it was kind of three different choices so what's the bottom line after doing all of the these testing and sanding and doing different things I think I would have approached it as I I found out from allied which is basically filling it in as close as you can you know filling up the crack having a little bit of a crown and then wiping it level with the level or as you saw back and forth and it takes a little bit of you know a little bit of skill to kind of go back and forth without removing too much but I think that might be the easiest way out of the three panels either way they all worked but in terms of how much time it took and the level of skill and things of that nature about anyways hopefully you learned something so did I I learned a whole lot you know that's the whole point of doing things like this as you kind of jump in there you figure it out each car is different and you just put it back in the rolodex of your detailing skills hopefully this gave you a little insight as I've said before and I'll say it many times this isn't the only way to do it this is just a way that I've chosen to do it today if you have a better way of doing it shoot me an email at Larry at mo NYC comm I want to give a big thanks to Richard Lynn you can check them out at show car detailing comm and as always appreciate you watching have a great day

Channel: AMMO NYC

Views: 7,730,377

Rating: 3.9975126 out of 5

Keywords: Larry Kosilla, www.ammonyc.com, Drive Clean, AMMO Auto Care, How to detail your car, best detailing products, waxing your car, best paint touch up tricks, how to touch up your car, paint touch techniques, best car detailer in the world, rupes polisher, applied colors, how to fix a rock chip, how to repair a key scratch, best key-scratch removal tricks, paint scratch, touch up paint, touch up, paint chip, how to remove a scratch, scratch removal, how to remove car scratches

Id: S2aC_oseMe4

Length: 32min 17sec (1937 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 17 2014

Reddit Comments

[u/Pinkman2012]

You mean the leveling fluid? Its just a compound. If you want that specific product its available on the ammo nyc website.

[u/zenautodetailing]

It's paint leveler used for touch ups. Its included in the Dr Colorchip kit.

Here's a link to some I found : Link