i have a few light scratches down the side of my punto full lenght of the car could anyone tell me the best way to get rid of them or make them less noticable.

If they are light and you cannot feel them with your fingernail, then a light cutting polish like AG Paint Renovator will be able to remove them. If they are deep they will need touching up and then polishing out either by wet sanding or a rubbing compund followed up with a good polish.

I found Halfords do a kit priced at about 8 quid for touching up small scratches. They had a display panel containing a wide range of colours for different manufacturers including Fiat's "Capri Blue". It worked for me.

cheers, i'll go and have a look in halfords near me. but am thinking of giving it a re-spray and changing the colour for it completeley so am not ging to do much to it at the moment.

THANKS

As I say, if the scratches aren't deep you can polish them out. If they've broken through the clearcoat into the paint, the undercoat or even the metal then touch-up or respray will be required so worth looking out for that Halfords kit.

Meguiars sells a product called Scratch X for polishing scratches out by hand - you may have to polish a number of times for it to be effective. Basically it is a fairly abbrasive polish. Alternatively a rubbing compound (go very easy and work up in stages as this is very abbrasive) followed by a polish will also work and much quicker.

Both will remove scratches which haven't penetrated the clearcoat. I've used the second method many times with great success. Something else you could try is something like AG Paint Renovator which I've used to remove the sort of scratches you get around door handles.

What you need really depends on how bad they are.

As for respray, better to buy a car the colour you want than respray an existing one. Can be pretty expensive and isn't good for selling the car later because people will think it has been mashed in an accident.

if you can't feel it but its left a sort of white scuff in the lacquer then you can get it out with some light rubbing compound (so light as in next stop is T cut, but t cut won't do it) like G3, halfrauds sell their own light rubbing compound in a yellow tube for £3.

Been using the cheap halfrauds stuff on my volvo 740, and there *was* a dirty great big gouge down near the full length of the nearside, dusted it off, polished it, buffed it, then rubbed it (use quite a lot for this scratch) about 2" either side up and down of scratch, left to dry a bit, then buffed a little more, then drowned it in polish to dilute it off, and then buff to a showroom shine!!!

After literally 10minutes work, I can't feel it and you can only see it if you look at the scratch from below scratch level, either that or pick the car up and hold it to the sun, I am very very impressed,,,,,,,,,
,,,,,SO I did the whole bonnet , followed by numerous other scratchs and front wings, oh and above the wheelarchs it was practically white, now a high glosss red! etc. Just T cut wax'd the rest of the car, but some time I'm free for a couple of hours I will do the whole car, and then the punto aswell, as it makes a huge difference, not even any swirl marks on it!

is it a metalic paint or standard?

hi just a quik note, a couple of years back i stopped my car in the middle of a automatic gate (thinking it had sensors, silly me) and ended up with a scratch from the drivers door all the way to the mudguard

i used diamond guard polish (hi quality whiteish coloured stuff car polish) with a cloth and alot of elbow grease. i got all the black out and most of the scratches on the paint out just by constantly polishing it a little bit at a time with alot of pressure.

can you use products like Scratch X on metalic paint?

Farecla G3 compound is the most abrasive stuff you can get, that means it can remove pretty serious scratches, or make them. if the paint is still on the car this is the first stage of repair. you then nead to use less and less abrasive products to get back to a perfect finish. Farecla G10 or T-Cut Metallic Colour Restorer is good for a second stage of repair, or good enough for the first stage on light scratches. 3M Imperial Hand Glaze is probably the best to finish things off before a good wax seals the deal.

I've started using the halfords touch up kit on my stilo, and i've gotta say, that i'm impressed at the colour match... but i reckon i must be a bit crap at touching up... it blatantly stands out... and i'm not happy that it takes 3 days in total to make finish it.

Right, i've spent today using rubbing compount and i've got rid of a scratch or two, but nw the paintwork around the scratch is dull, so i've got to get some coarse polish and then fine polish.

Rubbing compound defs does the trick though for getting rid of those pesky scratches. and if you use the above mentioned touch up kit, you can then use the rubbing compount to flat it off. assuming that i can polish it now to a matching finish, you would never know there was a scratch or a chip.

Lucky, I've used several products on my Marea since taking advice on this forum and its either ended up with "white" smearing in the laquer (?!?) or the scratches going away a little. I'm holding out for a respray when I get it LPG converted. Trying to make cars last a bit longer than I used to.

CheeseMaster said:

Lucky, I've used several products on my Marea since taking advice on this forum and its either ended up with "white" smearing in the laquer (?!?) or the scratches going away a little. I'm holding out for a respray when I get it LPG converted. Trying to make cars last a bit longer than I used to.

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Well I can see how it could have gone totally awry to be honest. The rubbing compound I got was coarse stuff... but I sensibly asked my friend (who currently has a business restoring cars) what the best way to do it was, and he said, grade it... start coarse and work down, and after a few goes of smooth polish there'll be no difference, also, he said if i madea cock up of it, he'd respray it and laquer it at mates rates.