I put a few scratches on the front bumper cover of my Mini when I removed the grille to install a grille badge. Is it safe to use Scratch X to polish those out? I know it's fiberglass and therefore may be damaged by it. Does anyone have any ideas on what's the best way to address this issue?

It's enough of a problem that I even considered replacing that section of the bumper but was not sure if the part came in the color of my car (chili red) or if a body shop would have to paint it. In that case I wouldn't do it because I don't like the whole "blending" thing. I'd rather not have to go to all that trouble anyway. I might even bring it to my dealership because their PDR guy was able to fix a door ding and did a really good job.

 

As long as the scratch doesn't go all the way through the paint, it doesn't matter if the underlying substrate is metal, plastic or fiberglas - the same scratch-removal techniques will work in all three cases. Without seeing how deep the scratches are, I don't know whether Scratch-X will fix them, though. It might, or you might have to go with a polish/compound on a buffer, or possibly all the way to wet-sanding the scratches out and then polishing/buffing afterward.

I think the bumper covers are only available new from MINI in unpainted form, but even if you were able to order one in Chili Red, I'd actually trust a paint match from a good body shop over buying a pre-painted cover from MINI. There are slight variations in colour, even from the factory, so I wouldn't rely on a factory-painted piece being a perfect match.

 

The one thing I was glad I did was order the factory prepainted Aero kit skirts because the texture painting perfectly matched my plastic trim. Having said that, if you're talking about the OEM bumper covers, then that's not even a concern since the arches aren't molded into them like the aero kits.

I agree with what Scott said.

Btw, painting the bumper probably won't cost more than a few hundred dollars. $400 tops. Because of that, I would have a body ship fix the area and respray the whole bumper. There are no portions on the bumper that you can blend into and not see the blending line. Even just the clear will have texture from the spraying and you will see where the texture ends. Trust me, I had an M3 owner ask me to sand out the texture from such a repair because the spot repair/blending looked horrible--stopped midway on the bumper. In the end, he ended up having to respray the whole bumper and do it right this time. He spent $350 for the spot repair, and another $400 to have it fixed by our shop--and I didn't charge him for the 2 hours of work I did to wetsand his bumper. Though that's not going to happen again.

You might just consider if maybe putting some filler putty in your damaged area, touch up, and wetsanding polishing might be satisfactory enough instead of spending to repaint the whole thing.

Richard

 

There are many quality mobile bumper replace places that can repair and restore your bumper to like new condition in 1-3 hours at home or office.

Don't pay a body shop to have a few scratches repaired (And loss use of your car for days or weeks) when a quality bumper repair mobile company can do a high quality job for the fraction of the cost of the body shop.