A Scratch: Misadventures In Automotive Scratch Repairs

The scratch was small, maybe half an inch long. Hard to even see unless you knew where to look. But once you knew, it was the only thing you could see. It was all I could see, anyway.

I had only had the car for two weeks when the scratch appeared. I’d gassed up just once by the time I saw it, right there on the hood. How could it have happened? A mishap at the car wash? A passerby I’d wronged? Some kind of deranged animal? It wasn’t from another car or falling debris, that was for sure. But what could have left this blemish, marring my beautiful new Mazda CX-5 with less than 300 miles on the odometer, leaving behind a scratch so deep I could run my fingernail inside it? From the looks of it, it went all the way down to the primer.

I guessed it didn’t matter. The real question was how to get rid of it.

My quest to remove the scratch took me first to my auto body repair center, who always seem to do good work. The guy with the clipboard said that for $100 they’d hand-wax it and try to buff it out. I crossed my fingers, but after the detailing the scratch was still there. I asked the technician, a term I use extremely lightly, to take another look. They squirted some polish onto a rag, rubbed it for a second and shrugged. Nothing we can do, the scratch is too deep. I would need to take more drastic action.

The aftermath of that encounter led me to the one place where I knew I could find a solution: The internet. And as I expected, I quickly found there was no shortage of tactics and products that promised to remove scratches from your vehicle, be they either tiny or deep.

See the original article here: https://www.wired.com/story/car-scratch-repair-kits/

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