I have received multiple calls to repair scratches and nicks in the inner door panels and other interior grained plastic panels. Many of the repair requests are for vehicles that have been in a collision which broke windows. The glass shards cause nicks and scratches to the PP or ABS panels. These damaged panels need to be repaired to before collision condition.

Repair methods already tried:
1) Heat with hot air welder, apply a graining pad to the hot substrate. Although this makes an improvement, many times the newly pressed grain is not even with the OEM.

2) CA repair and micro ballons (generic term), followed by a spray grain and top coat.
The results are not a perfect surface texture or appearance. The OEM grain is not of a pebble finish so the repair is noticed.

3) Heat with the hot air welder to reduce the furry appearance and hope the plastic has memory and the grain returns on it's own. Still have to spray your color coating.

Color coating issues:
1) Many of the inner panels are not painted/dyed/color coated (which ever you prefer to say) but are colored as a result of the plastic pellets metled down to make the panel in production. It may just be me, but, I find it very difficult to match the color 100% or even 85% in many cases. I have tried using the solvent pase color coating, water based color coatings, neither of which enables me to get the matching color.

2) Prepped the panels with numerous different cleaners, tried out several different adheasion promotoers (BullDog, Urethane Supply, SEM) neither of which seemed to get the color coating to bite and prevent the coating from peeling off. I understand PP is very oily, I have also tried using the heat gun and even a clean flame to prepare the plastic. I have then simply dragged a fingernail across the coating to test the adheasion to find out it comes off easily.

This is a large untapped market, I had to turn away 5 body shops jobs last week alone since the shop manager said "the customer knows where the damages are. If you cannot make it perfect we will have to replace the panel." Doing the math, 5x$125.00=$625.00 I lost out on. The way the industry is going in my area, that $625.00 loss hit hard.

Thanks,
John