Hi there, I bought my sc400 knowing the body was in a little rough shape, at least parts of it. From a distance car looks beautiful, up close, it has a decent amount of body issues.

I know nothing about body or paint work and was hoping I can at least patch a couple things up to make it look a bit nicer. My main concern is keeping rust away from the body. As the car honestly is rust free right now. Which in northern IL is a godsend.

Any help would be nice Thanks! heres pics. I don't even know whats going on or how paint can kinda spot like that...

 

And some more.

 

The bumpers will not rust, so you wouldn't have to do anything to them. Your door, looks like chipped paint only. I'm pretty sure that it still has the primer on it, one of my doors is the same. It shouldn't rust out anytime soon, but you could just use some touch up paint on it to ensure it will not rust. Just clean the surface really good before you paint. Your rear quarter panel looks like it is rusting under the paint already. Only way to fix it is to sand it down, to where all the rust(bubbling) is gone, and spray it with primer then paint to prevent it from getting worse. The metal may be pitted there too, so you might want to use a little bondo, then sand it down before primer and paint. If your'e not familiar with bondo and painting, I think your best bet would be to take a body shop. Shouldn't be too much for the quarter panel repair. Maybe about $200 or so.

 

Well there weird thing about the quarter panel is that it appears to have already been bondo'd. Repaired. The passenger panel is just fine. I think the driver was hit and repaired... but idk why the paint is kinda cracking idk...

 

I think you should just get a whole new paint job like me, if you don't have money for that then you could at least try and cover that up with touchup paint from your local Toyota/Lexus dealership. Our paint code is 202 Black. I bought one for about 14 dollars, I must say it covers up a lot. It won't be totally gone since on black paint you see everything as if it were a mirror, but at least it'll look a bit more appealing.

 

LOL mine is in way worse shape!

 

O ok thanks I will do that.

 

Update I went and bought the $11.00 vial of touch up paint from toyota. WOO I am so happy everything looks pretty decent now. I fixed about everything and minor touched up the rear quarter panel. Thanks guys. I am totally satisfied for a $10.00 touch up job.

 

I wish it was that easy for me. My car has a dent on just about every metal surface let alone cracking plastic. The rear quarter panel was repaired in the past and hit again and the previous owner didn't fix that and now I have to cut out about 1 square foot of it because it is corroded pretty bad.

 

Well the thing is man. I sold 3 cars to get this one in this shape. I paid $3860 for this one.

Mainly because, it had a full tint job, came with rims and a set of stock rims already installed on car, a $600 viper alarm system, and a really nice sub system. So as far as I was concerned it already had everything I wanted done to it. which would save me probaly over 1-1.5k in parts and labor.

But if it had a NICE detailing job done it could look like this again.