Touch up paint

I made an attempt to touch up a paint nick on the tank of my 500. The Colorite touch ups are kind of pricey, so I concocted my own paint mix. I used two Dupli-Color Scratch Fix touch-up bottles that I had decided was close to the Candy Aleutian Blue Honda color, Honda Electron Blue Pearl and Ford Sonic Blue. I experiemented with a mix of the two until the shade matched as well as my eye would determine. The 1st pic shows 3 coats applied until the paint was a blob above the surface of the paint. 2nd pic shows the results of wet sanding with 1000 grit wetordry paper and buffing. The nick is still somewhat visible up close, but from a couple of feet is not noticeable. I am going to experiment further with technique with hope of improving the result.

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I know photo's can be deceiving but that looks great to my eye.

 

hey creaky
did you fill the nicks first and with what may I ask? I'm in need of touch up too. Your color scheme looks good to me and did you get those colors from crappy tire?
cheers!

 

Looks like he just applied enough paint to fill the nick entirely and then some. Once it solidified into a lump he then wetsanded it down and buffed the heck outta it.

 

OK..I know nothing about his process, but to me that looks damn good. So...tell me this: after you put the touch up paint on there, you simply took wet sandpaper (in 1000 grit strength) and put it RIGHT ON THE TANK and rubbed it back & forth? Or in a circle? Like I said, I know nothing about this, but that sounds ballsy to me. And all the sandpaper did was take the touch-up paint down a bit? Then you buffed it....by hand or electric buffer? What'd you use with that...car wax?

Just trying to fill in the holes for my own knowledge is all. Thanks.

 

For preparation, I wet sanded the nick lightly with 1000 grit wetordry paper, being as careful as possible to just feather the edges of the nick slightly. Next step was to clean the area thoroughly with denatured alcohol. I put a small dab of primer in the nick, so as to get none on the blue original finish. I mixed the two colors I mentioned until it looked close and applied thin coats until the dab was raised above the original surface. I let it dry overnight. I sanded carefully with the 1000 paper and water using a small rubber sanding block and using short back and forth strokes. I found that if you use too much pressure, the softer touch-up paint sands more quickly than the original finish and you wind up with a depression where the nick was. I put on another coat, let it dry and sanded very lightly, then hand rubbed with a damp cloth and 3M white polishing compound. I finished it off with Honda brand spray cleaner/wax. The Duplicolor Scratch-Fix was purchased at a local KOI auto parts store. Later, I saw the same stuff at Wallyworld a bit cheaper. I have since tried to cover a couple of nicks on the white portion of the tank with good results, but the paint dried just slightly darker than the original color. I am considering buying some Colorite touch up in hopes that the colors will match better than what I used. I will be experimenting further, I'll post pics of the results.