I've Been Keyed - Handiest Way to Deal with It?

Kintarō Hattori

Hey Folks,

Came out of the cinema into an overflow carpark yesterday and saw this. I'm not going to get too annoyed about it. The car is basic enough and is almost 8 years old. With that in mind, it's hardly ripe for a respray, so what's the most cost effective way to treat this? It's down to the metal, so I'd like to keep rust away.

Any advice is appreciated.

Fabio

Ah shite. That's a nasty thing to happen to you.

If you just want to keep the rust at bay you could use something like petroleum jelly just to cover it. It'll look ugly and need replacing every couple of rainy days but if it'll stop rust from eating in there until you can do something better.

The other thing you can do is to get a touch-up kit for yourself, clean off that petroleum jelly (if you do that), clean it all down with alcohol (electrical contact spray would work). Apply the touch-up paint yourself according to the instructions BUT a lot of that sort of paint needs ambient temperatures of above 10 degrees or something like that so check it first. If you manage to get that all done (maybe a heat gun or a hairdryer could get the metal and paint up to temp) you could polish it back down so it kinda blends in with the surrounding paint.

Before you do any of that I'd encourage you to go to a paint or crash repair place and just ask for a quote for a job and explain it doesn't have to be perfect, just enough to protect the steel, and it might be cheaper than you think.

Ljmscooter

Nail varnish

bladespin

One cheap option would be to use a touch up kit from Halfords, after that you could sand flat and buff it to blend if you wanted to.

User1998

Touch up paint will make it look worse if your not careful

DaveyDave

A Sharpie :)

In all seriousness a touch up kit won't be perfect but it will make you forget about it. The wind blew the door of my Golf into the pillar when cleaning it one day, scratch is about an inch long and wide enough. Rough scratch too. The touch up kit doesn't hide the imperfections in the texture but visually I'd have to look for it and it's on the driver's door too.

phelimb

That's nasty - in fairness to you the rest of the paintwork looks immaculate, I'd be raging!

Anyway, years back, my Mrs inadvertently scratched the side of my Celica with a coat hanger when the car was only 1 year old or so. I used a wax crayon to fill it in and then a good polish/waxing.

It needed to be redone every now and then but from a distance the scratch wasn't noticeable. It was down to bare metal but never rusted afterwards. I used something like in the below link that came with a chipstick...also used it on stone chips...works well in my opinion!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Turtle-Wax-70-037-Color-Magic/dp/B001FOLMU2/ref%3Dasc_df_B001FOLMU2/?tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=310668964056&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=2505570631557949701&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=20474&hvtargid=pla-491013013096&psc=1

Kintarō Hattori

Thanks for all the advice folks, it's greatly appreciated.

patmahe

Gets some cutting compound (in a motor factors or somewhere like halfords), the scratches look deep but cutting compound will take a thin layer of paint off but also soften the paint around the scratches slightly, this will allow the surrounding paint to fill the gaps a bit. Once you've done that, as others have said a little touch up kit, then polish and wax to protect, you'll be surprised how well that might come back up.

Also the people who do stuff like this are scum. Sorry it happened to you.