So every other week I drive down to my grandma's to help out with things on the farm. She loves my Honda Fit for hauling things around. Unfortunately one of her dogs did not like it and decided to bite the rear bumper. Should I go to the dealership and pay them to fix it, or is this something I can do myself? Any advice would be helpful. Thanks!

 

Ouch that looks deep. Someone scratched my Fit in a hotel parking lot and I was able to buff it out just using wax and then removing it with a micro fiber towel. I repeated this process over and over until the scratch was no longer visible. I haven't noticed it since but the scratch wasn't very deep. Good luck.

 

Try Meguiars ScratchX first - it should help a lot then see how bad it looks after. It won't fix the parts that are down to plastic but it might not be too noticeable after you get done. In the end, its only the bumper after all.

 

Time for some touchup paint.

 

Here is a little trick to making minor scratches become much less apparent. Not a permanent solution, but, for instance, if you needed to sell a used car or something and let us say, minimize its flaws:

Go to a local hardware store and get small tin of linseed oil.

Put a small amount of linseed oil, say a dot the size of a dime, on a clean cloth.

Wipe slowly into the scratch.

Take a different clean cloth, buff it out before the oil dries. If you let it dry, it gets hard and crusty. You have a couple minutes, but it won't take you that long.

Less is more, oil wise.

You'll be surprised how much better a lot of scratches look to the eye. Works better on some paint colors than others.

This is a little trick old time used car lots use to make things look spiffy for a potential sale. Doesn't FIX the scratch, but makes it less obvious for a while.

 

That scratch is too deep to buff out or fill with oil (which is what a lot of automotive glazes do to microscratches). If you don't feel comfortable doing it yourself with touchup paint from Honda, ask your dealership if they work with someone that does minor paint touchups. They'll be able to apply the color AND a top coat and finish it out nicely for you, probably for around $150.

As a rule, if you can catch your fingernail in a scratch, even a little bit, then it's too deep to buff out. If you DO buff a scratch like that out, you run the risk of "burning" your paint -- removing all the clear coat in that spot, which WILL require a professional fix -- or at least compromising the clear coat which may lead to early failure and/or fading.

Good luck with the fix.

 

[quote=animes2k;479487]That scratch is too deep to buff out or fill with oil quote]

I'm on a computer where I can't see images in the thread, so was just speaking in general. Correct, anything major, the oil trick will not work. Works great for little things you want to hide.

 

75r: for reference, the scratch looks to be down into, if not past the primer, as well as being relatively wide and rough around the edges.

 

The visible black part is definitely plastic part of the bumper.
I would do a touch up just to make it less visible. If you want you can try Langka after that.

What IS going on?? Must be a bad month for 2009; 94_accord, Chainsaw, Kingofpicklez, SomberResplendence and myself.
I just saw a big scrape mark on my rear bumper today. Mine probably got hit yesterday while I was running some errand.

Polished a bunch of them off but there are some deep ones are still there.

 

In that case, as I think someone else mentioned, most dealerships have a guy who comes around and fixes stuff like this on the lot. They could probably refer you to this person. If you find one of these people who is good, they will be able to do a very nice job on a bumper repair. Certain colors are easier than others. For instance, Taffetta White would be easier to blend in a small repair area than, say, Orange. Metallics are tougher. Silver is sometimes very hard to match in my experience, as is bright red.

 

Thanks for the help guys. I think on Monday I'm going to the dealership to get a quote/ ask to see if their is a guy that does this work for them and try to get in contact with him. I'll keep you updated on how much this would be to fix, in case anyone else is curious. :P

 

Get the correct (fresh mixed) touch up paint and DO NOT use a brush etc. Get a hypodermic syringe and needle. Fill the syringe with just enough to fill the scratch. (make sure the scratch is clean) use the needle to lay in just enought paint to fill the scratch and don't overfill. Let it self level. Wait a few days and buff etc. The hypodermics are available at farm and ranch (livestock) stores. Get a small needle. If you get it some other place I don't wanna' know!

 

Ouch!!!.. Bad dog...

 

So I went to Honda... who sent me to a 3rd party business who handles their body repairs... and I was quoted at $408.00!!!! So I'm going to check out a local body shop and see what they say. If I don't get anything reasonable, I'll be fixing the scratch for myself.

 

Ouch. That sounds like they're quoting your for a respray of the entire area - which you definitely don't want! Talk about overkill. For reference, a new bumper for most late model cars - with paint - is around $600-800. This is a scratch repair.

 

I hope you think about it carefully before you do anything. Seriously - I still recommend you just try using some Meguiars ScratchX and then leave it. It won't be perfect, but I've never seen perfect touch-ups. I've tried PaintScratch, DupliColor and OEM touch-up paint and never been satisfied with the results and wonder why I try. Its just hard to impossible to get it level and perfect and you have to buff around the surrounding areas to blend it in and risk damaging the surrounding area.

You could get the whole bumper repainted and then you run the risk of paint not matching up exactly.

I had a worse looking scratch and made most of it except the black disappear with ScratchX - it wasn't even very noticeable that I even forgot about it and was like oh yeah - when I saw it washing the car some weeks later.

 

Scratch-X isn't going to help a scratch that goes down to the plastic in the bumper. It will help a minor scratch limited to the clearcoat. It's basically a light polish made for hand use. It's just going to round the edges of a normal clearcoat scratch and potentially eliminate LIGHT scratches in the clearcoat.

It is NOT the right product for this scratch.

 

It will fix most of it - except the part that is down to the plastic. Most people are better off leaving it alone IMO than trying to touch it up... a lousy touch-up is way worse looking to me than that bare plastic. Until you try it you won't know how much better it will look and if you can live with the remaining defect.

 

That's why I recommended a professional that deals with small paint repairs. Doing a proper touchup job is definitely not easy and requires a lot of things to come together.

 

Thanks for the recommendations guys. I don't know what I would do without the help of this forum for some stuff. (I didn't even know I could ruin the tint with some windex, good thing I learned that before cleaning my windows!) I'll get some quotes from other body shops and keep you guys posted. Hopefully you guys won't have to go through this! But in the end, all it is, is a scratch, so it could be worse...