Best Paint Touch-up Tricks: Mercedes G55

What's up guys today? I'm working on the 2013 G 55 truck and as you can see it's black, this is a beautiful 5.5 liter v8 that makes about 382 horsepower. Now the interesting thing about the G Wagon is that it hasn't really changed its appearance. in 23 years, the outward appearance because it has an iconic image, so to speak, and I think it looks pretty good now, the reason I've been called here today is because of 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 it's a nine foot scratch with a spanner all over the side of the car.

Now I definitely know why or how this happened. I guess you should say it wasn't like that. like we were going from the back or the owner of the car wasn't going through big mountains and trees and the whole thirty feet and a tree got him, that would be annoying but acceptable, this was parked in a parking lot for, you know, the lunch. or dinner or whatever and someone came out and marked it clearly and I can actually see some marks and we'll zoom in on the camera. There's something about that that just doesn't sit right with me, as I'm sure it does.

I can imagine and it really irritates me, so as a car enthusiast, I'm sure all this kind of sentiment can resonate, so today Let's talk about how to fix this and some of the thought processes that go into it now. In this particular case, we're going to talk about a few different things and one of them is that the entire pound would typically need to be re

paint

ed. The problem is the multiple panels, which is more complicated and there are middle sections that have to be removed. It's a complicated and extremely expensive re

paint

, so we're going to try to repair it today, all of that will be seen today in this episode, as you can see, we got the car inside now before I did it, I actually did a few things to make my life. easier when you're done with the process.

The first thing was that I cleaned the wheels. I washed the car now in the scratch while washing and soaping it. I actually made a little bit of clang and the reason I did that is a little bit of forethought. I was thinking ahead knowing that I would have to polish this with a three inch rupee polisher and when I did I didn't want to have any problems in terms. of contamination sticking out and having my pad there, it's smart, it took me 30 seconds and I wanted to wash everything because when I present the car to the owner I don't want to have to redo everything and

touch

everything I write.

I want to just keep this area sensitive, so I'll vacuum and everything, but I thought, hey, why don't we wash beforehand? That's something you might want to keep in mind. Okay, after I dry it, I want to make sure. that I use the air compressor because you don't really want the air, you don't need water, sorry, flowing through all the things that you're doing, especially in the crack, and this particular car looks a lot like a Hummer, one of the Hummers h1. or even a Hummer h2, there are all these little complexities that water gets trapped in, so make sure to use compressed air after it's completely dry.

I started installing my drop cloth there and the reason I did that is because there is rubber on the actual car. If you know the g550, there are these little rubber pieces, I'll take a close up photo of them and they react strangely; You know, waxes and things of that nature, it's like a molding, but it's in a peculiar area. it's right in the middle of the door, so that's my advantage: what I like to do is think, hey, how long will it take me to cover this and how much did it cost me? It cost me four dollars and it took me ten minutes based on the price of the car 120 hundred and thirty thousand whatever you know about that price sometimes you have to use your head and say for ten minutes I'm going to avoid any problems I don't want anything to leak here alone It's going to make my life easier so this is what I did, it's overkill maybe a little but I think that's why a customer like this might want someone like me to work on the car because I'll have a little more protection here, so spend ten minutes being smart.

After that, the next step you should do is to use 91% isopropanol to clean it. Now I imagine it like this, with a scratch of this nature or this type of depth, it's almost like getting a cut in your skin. The first thing you want to do is clean it and a lot of times not necessarily with alcohol, but you know you want to put some things in that will clean the cut when you go to the emergency room, let's say in this case. We're going to remove all the oils and all the dirt and everything else so that all of our new stuff will stick to it like Bondo, so we're going to talk more about some of the steps that I did but I worked on it.

I came back just because I wanted to see how you'd know how it worked and we'll go over some of the intricacies and tips, but it's going pretty well. This is a two day process and I'll bring the camera and show you how to make this center panel with some bondo. Now the techniques that I show you today I learned from a dear friend of mine, Richard Lane, he is a master at

touch

ing up cars and he just does it to make it look. absolutely perfect, so I've been on the phone with him back and forth, he's been helping me because I'm always really interested in hearing how other people think about things, perceive things and how they actually do them, so a big greeting.

Thanks for doing that, but one of the things we talked about is that we were debating whether to wet sand it first and from what I heard it's pretty deep, so any possibility of wet sanding it isn't really an option, but The second thing is when a key mark like this or a scratch or anything that impacted the paint, if it's some kind of jagged edge, what will happen is there will be a scratch, this will be the V of the scratch, but on the top . From this there will be all these little spikes that can sometimes occur and you can feel that as you run your hand through it with or without a glove you will be able to feel like your glove is catching a little bit and you can almost hear it in this case, it's that we don't have that so at first I was thinking before I got here, maybe I'll have to wet sand it with mm just to clean up the edges and if you remember from the video I made where there was a symbol on the hood.

I actually had to do that because the edges were so rough and the way I figured it out was one, you can feel it, but both because I'm, you know, a nerd and then I said I put a microscope in there because I could see. You know, I got really close. I could see the edges and there was nothing sticking out. So what's the point of the story usually? I guess I wouldn't say normally, but on some occasions. I'm going to have to wet sand this just to make a flat surface so the brush, the bondo, and all the things we're polishing don't get caught in the sticking out stuff, the sticking out paint, or the key mark. or whatever is sticking out, so we skip that step now, what I did next knowing I didn't have to is wipe it all down with isopropanol and now it's ready, dry and clean for bondo per Richards suggestion and I left these here, They are old as I taped them around the scratch and taped them very very very close, in fact I took a little microscope picture and I'll show you how close the tape was to the actual scratch and the reason why.

I did it because I didn't want it to overflow when sanding, which we didn't do, but if I sanded it and made it so there wasn't any extra space or overlap, so to speak, and then the other part was I had to put Bondo in there, We're going to do the Bondo trick and I'll talk more about that on this side. I just want to show you that you know stage one looks a lot better, but if you get closer you can see that there are a lot of bumps and ridges, which is okay because I'm going to let it dry, we'll sand it later, but the reason why it's so difficult and kind of a challenge and why this is really hard to do multiple reasons because it's very deep because cars are very expensive and because of this plastic I don't have room to get in here so I really needed to tape everything down and see if I could try it now for the record here, there's no right way to do this there's just multiple options and you have to choose and right now, you know, roll out all the things that I've done and I've got Richard Lynn on my shoulder helping me.

I'm trying. to pick and choose what's going to fit, so I can't use the tape technique, so I'm going to show you here without tape the bondo trick and we'll just stick it in the hole to fill it. that hole, so now he's going to fill it in and then on top of that, later, like I did here, I'm going to put touch up paint that's going to be a crown on top of it and tomorrow, once the salt dries, I'm going to come back, sand it and polish it and follow those steps, so that's the two day process and the day you're waiting for is based on drying the paint.

Ideally you would like to have a heat lamp in there. I do not do it. I don't have it here because I actually traveled far to get here and it's kind of hard to put one of those in a car, so I didn't do that. You have to use the tools you have, so I picked it up. The heat here is nice and warm. I have a big lamp here, it's about 85 degrees here, it will stay on through the night. I'll put a light even closer, so we should be fine in terms of curing time, so let's do the bondo. trick and I'll show you what bondo is all about.

Well, the trick I learned from Richard is to use a little bondo. Now this is bondo glaze and 3 m stain putty, then you're going to open it up and now what I'm using. here it's just a plastic squeegee so it can bend super securely and I'm not going to scratch so what I do is I put a little bit on the edge here like this I'm just going to do this little area because it's on the camera and just I'd like to fill it in, okay, it's going to be a little messy. Fill it, kind of like putty.

Have you ever caulked a room? The goal of what you are trying to do is to even out the scratch. Remember the scratch. It has a big hole so now I'm trying to fill it with all the putty and the bondo dries very quickly so it's not like you have to wait all night so you have to be a little quick so what I What I'm doing now is I'm filling it now. Ideally you want to fill it to the top, so here's the scratch again. Ideally, you want to leave a little bit of space so you can put a good crown of paint, touch our paint, take this thing that comes out of your edge, get there and luckily you know that with this you're not scratching anything because it's already drying fast so it's a constant game you're playing here of removing excess but not removing too much, well you don't know, you're not filling the hole itself so I'll have a good 10, 15, 20 minutes depending on what so good go. of filling this, filling this little hole in this is where you know the craft or the art comes into play 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 you fill it and put the crown on it starts to sink and then it goes down and that's when you see the pothole and if you're going to sand it doesn't matter much because there's still a hole there and if you're standing on it there's still a hole, that's why you always want put a little bubble in, but that requires a lot of drawing and drying back and forth and back and forth, put it on, test it and put it on, so if it takes all night just let it dry, that's the problem here is that if you do it wrong you have to wait another night so that's what you could spend weeks and weeks or weeks doing this so Bondo shortens that by filling that space and then on top of that you can put a good layer of protection i.e. paint, so I'm going to keep doing this and film a little bit and show you what the next step is because 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 scratch again.

This is the specific technique you would use with Bondo. Sometimes people just want to put on touch up paint and that's okay too. we're just talking about the bondo step that we're going to do is take a little bit of leveler, basically something that's going to accomplish everything else. Now this is where it gets a little complicated, where you have to do it. Have a good eye and a good hand. You want to remove the bad things, that is, the things that are there. Normal paint. Paint that isn't scratched, but you don't want to remove too much.

You don't want to remove anything that is there. in the actual hole or in the scratch, so if you do too much you have to go back and put it back in, so it's like you have to have a little bit of technique and a little bit of hand coordination here to do it. You see, right now it only goes so far, so now I have to work from the top down and sometimes it might be a little more challenging because you can't see, but I'm going to do this. This is probably so. Take another 10 or 15 minutes to get it perfect and that's all you should really see is a red line, which is great.

What I wanted to show here is that while I was doing this I said I had to get on a camera while I was doing it. Don't tape it like I did with the last one, I mean, tape it to the edge at all times and the reason why, like I said before, I was very close to this rubber and Ibelow and you will have to play and discover how far you can go. Works? Do you need to go with a stronger or heavier grit should I use 2500 should I use 2000 it all depends on how long the cure time was and I'm going a little bit against the grain to see if I can reduce those little hilly edges now one of the reasons The reason The reason I didn't stay here is because I simply didn't have room to fit the sandpaper in and if I did, I wouldn't have enough room to fit the rupee polisher in afterwards, so it was a fun experiment to play with. with both sides and sometimes you have to use two different options, but I can't reiterate just show you multiple options and things you can do, but I agree that on a small and not gigantic chip like this, the actual technique or method that Los colors the guys say to do is probably the

best

approach and that is to fill it with the supplied material, let it dry and then use the leveler to remove it so it is somewhat reduced.

Let me put the camera in and I'll show you. I mean there are scratch marks because we're obviously sanding, but you'll see that the top ridges have been reduced and now it's just a matter of how far I can go without removing the paint, that's kind of the case in 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 kind of a consequence of just using the polar camera before combining with the rupee three inch pneumatic polisher. I wanted to try blending the surrounding area with a five mil grit disc and a three inch garage interface because not much power was needed in this particular case, after a lot of sanding you can see the touch up has started to even out with the paint surrounding area, which makes it less obvious.

Next, I use the Rupee's 3-inch grinder along with the three-inch McGuire cutting wheel, making quick work of the five-thousand grit tip. However, we are still slightly removing the black touch-up on the pad, so be careful not to overdo it. Lastly, I polish the panel. For a perfect combination, well guys, after a few more hours today, I'm almost done. I think the car became what we call a 6-footer, or so, I don't know if it's two or three feet, so it's still there. there, if you bring your face closer, you can still see it, but much better and I think it's within the range of acceptability in terms of knowing how to talk to the client or the client, the person who owns it and measuring the level of hey.

It's not going to be perfect, it's going to be really cool, but it's not perfect, you want to perfect it, you have to repaint it, so I think, with that understanding, it looks pretty good, and the most important thing is that it's protected, It won't rust, now all the options we have. We did option one which was to use bondo because there were a lot of different levels which meant deep indentations here and then a little indentation of the deep indentation so there's a lot of depth difference and when it's very deep sometimes you want to use bondo so I did that in some cases and then we just did it, we also did the wet sanding technique instead of just using the leveler and then the other one, the third technique was to just stick it in the hole with the Allied supplied material and then remove it with leveler, so it was three different options, so what's the end result after doing all this testing and sanding and doing different things?

I think I would have approached it like I found out from Allied, which is basically filling it in as close as possible. Can you figure out how to fill the crack with some crown and then clean it to the level or like you saw from one side to the other and it takes a little bit of skill to go from one side to the other? without taking too much away, but I think that might be the easiest way out of the three panels either way, they all worked, but in terms of how long it took and skill level and things of that nature, anyway, I hope that you have learned something.

I learned a lot, you know, that's the whole point of doing things like this, when you get out there, you realize that every car is different and you just put it back into the rolodex of your detailing skills. Hopefully this gave you some. Insight, as I have said before and will say many times, this is not the only way to do it, it is just a way I chose to do it today, if you have a better way to do it, shoot me. an email to Larry at mo NYC comm. I want to thank Richard Lynn.

You can check them out at show car Detailing comm and, as always, I appreciate you watching us. Have a great day.