Scraped sideskirt - options?

B

blinkme323

New member
Hey guys, I was driving home late last night and as luck would have it, I clipped a curb and scrapred my sideskirt towards the rear wheel. The picture actually makes it look a little worse than it is, but right now it looks like my options are the following:



a) Touch up the spot as best I can



b) Buy a whole new side skirt



c) Just let it go



I'm extremely OCD, so this is really bothering me right now, lol. Any help is appreciated.



blinkme323-albums-pics-picture7649t-photo.jpg
 
I had a similar scratch on my last car. The location is actually good in that even a slightly imperfect repair will be unnoticed. To fix mine, I cleaned out the scratch, sanded it smooth, and touched it up with OEM touchup paint (built up a couple of layers until it was just slightly above the original paint level). Let it dry for a couple of days than sanded it down with 1500, 2000, and 3000 grit paper wet and wrapped around a square pencil eraser. Polished it up and it was good to go. Even if you were very close and looking right at it, you still had to know it was there to find it. Total cost was just a few dollars and a couple of hours.



LL
 
It's hard to tell how bad that really is from your small pic. It's possible a good polishing would make that much less noticeable (be careful if you are using a machine those panels heat up fast and you'll burn the paint off). Like lland, I've had good luck touching up something like that after sanding it smooth.



The thing that makes me think it's not really bad is that it's white...frequently those panels are black plastic. What is the white? The substrate? Primer? Scratched Clear? Transfer from the curb? Have you tried anything on it yet?
 
If you buy a new skirt, you'll have to get that painted, and if you're OCD, that is going to be an adventure. I'd just hit it with some touchup paint. If you do your homework, you can make it look very good. Is it metallic paint? If so, you have your work cutout for you as you can't really sand metallics without changing the appearance (the flakes float to the top and get sanded off first). Anyway, good luck.
 
Sorry for the pic quality guys, it's the best I can do at the moment. Looking at the mark further it appears that the paint and most of the primer have been scraped off, but there looks to be minimal damage to the skirt itself. I priced out a replacement skirt and it is about $500 painted...
 
wannafbody said:
Try some Megs Ultimate compound, chances are if it's deep it will need painted.
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Yeah, I've pretty much resided myself to the fact that it has to be painted. It's just a matter of whether I'll have to paint the whole thing or just touch it up.
 
Setec Astronomy said:
I wish you would humor me and try some polish on there by hand and see how it looks.
Click to expand...



I'll certainly give it a shot. I did try some scratch-x and it didn't have much of an effect. I'll let you know how the polishing compound goes.
 
Why replace this piece when it can be repaired/refinished easily? Probably $100-$150 for a Body Shop to remove, sand, fill and refinish.
 
Just a quick update guys, I went over the scrape with some compound and it did take a little bit of residual scrapes away from either edge, but the majority still remains.
 
Well, I took it to the dealership yesterday and upon inspecting the scrape, the estimator said that they "just need to touch it up" and that it would be free of charge. So they took my car back and about 15 minutes brought it back out. At first glance it looked ok, but upon getting it home I realized that they used the wrong color black for the touch up! So needless to say, I removed the touch up paint and went and ordered the correct color online. I'm really debating on whether I should just do it myself at this point.
 
I went ahead and tried to touch it up myself yesterday and it looks pretty good, just a little splotchy, which I'm sure can be smoothed out with some wet-sanding, I'm just kind of hesitant to do it. Any detailers local to the Philly / delco area willing to help put on the finishing touches?
 
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