When I went to the dealer the shop first brought out a touch up pen, then said they had a jar also. I've never used a pen before. My poor prius has her first dings. I have a small ding in the rear passenger door, that looks like a door mark. Its small so I'm hoping a detail shop can pull it out. The back bumper has scrathes on it.
I personally like the touch up paint pen better than the jar. The pen does a better job on small scratches, etc. than the jar with a paint brush. I seem to be able to get the pen point in to hair line scratches and dings without having paint on the good paint itself. I have used one on my wife's 2007 Honda Accord for the past year or so and have had good success with it. I bought a pen for my Prius but fortunately have not had to use it yet.
i tried a paint pen once from the dealership and one from Pepboys. the dealership one wasn't great, but the pepboys one was worse. i also used the paint bottle with brush from touchuppaintonline.com and thought that was better. if you are fixing small little chips, use a toothpick and dip it into the paint a little, then put the paint onto the car that way. it worked really well for me and I learned that method from another forum.
I just got silver touch up paint from Caldwell Toyota in Ark, and it seems to be able to operate both in pen-like mode and brush-and-bottle mode. Unfortunately, I may not be using it any time soon. If you go to the thread Ugly scrapes on . . . Rubber? you will see a picture showing why I have been advised not to do the job myself. Sigh.
Get the Toyota touch up paint bottle. Use a toothlick, and apply several very light coats/dabs, allowing half an hour between coats to dry/shrink.
Yikes, do you have it fixed? Mine is not that bad. The damage to the top of the bumper has about 1/4"x1/8" oval of black rubber showing, I'm wondering if I should sand it down. Then I have a bunch of little scratches. I think I'll pick up the bottle tomorrow.
The pen is one of those things that I thought was a great idea, but it dried up so fast that I ended up removing the brush from under it and using toothpicks. I think (in my case) that the ball point type opening is kind of small for paint to flow freely and it just stopped working really fast while there was plenty of paint left. I understand that it might have just been a bad one, but the action of a ball point pen with paint is quite similar to a toothpick with a larger opening you can dip into and you just throw away your "brush" every time and replace it at minimal cost.
