Plastic interior scratches

[chrisx]

Posting this on behalf of another person.

I have a lot of scratches on the interior silver plastic around the gear shift and radio housing on my silver '05 Outback.

Need a recomendation on which Mequiar's products would be best to get them out. Looked at the plastic polish but it said it was for clear plastic.

Thanks.

[Mike Phillips]

Hi Chris,

I post this information so much I think I need to create an article for it.

In order to remove a scratch out of anting, metal, plastic glass, paint, etc. You must remove material around the scratch until the surface is level or equal to the lowest depths of the scratch or scratches.

The below diagram if for paint, the the same thing applies to just about an surface material or coating.



In essences, you don't really remove a scratch, you remove material around a scratch.

Then the big question is, is the material or coating workable, as in can you abrade small particles of it and leave behind an original looking surface. For example, some things you can abrade, (remove the scratch), but you can never completely remove all of your abrading marks, thus you can't really fix the problem, all you can do is exchange one set of scratches of a different set of scratches.

The next questions is, how thick is the surface material you're working on or the coating. You are limited to what you can do by the thickness of these to things, (surface coating or surface material), and whether or not this surface is workable.

Sometimes you don't know what you can so until you try. Another way of saying this is I wouldn't know if I could remove the scratches in your friend's plastic material until I tried. If and after I tried I might discover success or failure and if it's failure, I'll have hoped/wished I tried in an inconspicuous area.

For removing scratches out of plastic by hand, the product to use would be PlastX. I don't know if this will work on Chrome plastic because I haven't tried it myself.

My guess is the product/substance that makes the plastic look chrome is very thin and encapsulated somehow in plastic. If this is true, you might be able to polish/abrade the plastic around the scratches until the surface is level, but this might alter the appearance in a negative manner.

[chrisx]

Thanks for the reply Mike.

I'm not sure exactly what the surface is (painted, clear coat, etc) so I thought maybe someone would have already has this problem on a silver finish.

[Mike Phillips]

Can you take a picture?

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