I live in Mountain View Ca and need a recommendation for a good, fair priced shop to get some cosmetic scratches taken care of on my front and rear bumber.
Does anyone have a recommendation?
I don’t live in CA, so I can’t recommend a shop. I know you posted this question yesterday, but no one responded. Maybe someone in your area will have a suggestion for you.
I suggest you learn to live with the scratches. You can spend money having them “taken care of,” but how long will it be until someone taps your bumper, front or rear, and you have another scratch?
Scratches are part of life. Accept them, ignore them, and move on to more important things.
In the absence of a local recommendation,
a) Take it in to a nearby body shop for an estimate. It may be less than you expect.
b) Call a good-sized car dealership with large used car lot and ask who they use to touch up paint chips. They all use someone or have someone on staff who is expert on this… often it is a mobile touchup servicer.
c) I’ve had a very good experience on our Mercedes by doing it ourselves using Dr. Colorchip www.drcolorchip.com which sells color-matched kits at about $50. You seeingly don’t get much for your money; 4 oz of blending solution, 1 oz of color, rubber glove, and blending rag and instructions. But, for me anyway, the results were better than expected. In our case the leading edge of the hood and bumpers were moderately chipped, and the rear bumper had one area of (5) 3" long parallel scratches. 30 minutes later and frankly the car looked very nice.
It is an odd set of instructions in that you clean the area, apply the paint with a small stick, then tamp it with your gloved finger, then swipe it with the rag. You can still see the imperfections but you need to be purposefully looking for them. Just walking by the car it looks like new. It is now 2 or 3 years later and it has held up perfectly.
I disagree with mcparadise, in that so many cars would look so much better with just a little bit of touchup, and so what if you need to repeat it every year or two. I agree with mcparadise in that in considering the whole of eternity and creation, none of this matters a hoot in the whole scheme of things, which is probabably how mcparadise looks at things.
I’m not that well grounded myself. I tend to feel better when tooling around in a clean ride with immaculately clean glass. I relax a little more when the lawn is mown.
Soul mate. It’s a grounding issue, huh?