How many times have you been driving around, enjoying your E46 on a bright sunny day and heard the horrible sound of a rock being bouncing off your car? It is only a matter of time that you are going to be faced with this situation and no one likes the look of an unsightly chip in the paint! Now you are faced with either taking your car to a body shop to fix those chips or taking advantage of the AutoSharp paint pen from AutoVisuals. We chose to try out the AutoSharp pen and see just how well it worked!

The AutoSharp pen utilizes a felt tipped applicator to provide you with the easiest possible experience while touching up the paint on your car. If you have ever colored in a coloring book and stayed inside the lines, you can probably do this. In addition to making the product easy to use, AutoVisuals also provides an exhaustive selection of color codes that can match the color on your car perfectly!

As it is spring time, we thought it would be a great time to finally get out our AutoSharp pen and try it out on the Alpine White 330i. It didn’t take long to find some trouble spots on the car including some small little chips and some slightly larger areas.

We set off to work by first reading the directions (well, most of them) on the pen and find all the necessary tools. Step one is obvious for anyone that has ever painted before; make sure the surface is clean! We used some rubbing alcohol on the surfaces to ensure that the area was free from dirt and wax which seemed to work quite well.

Before using the pen, AutoVisuals recommends vigorous shaking of the pen to ensure the paint is mixed correctly and an exact match of paint colors is achieved. After shaking the pen for about a minute we grabbed a paper towel and depressed the tip a few times until the tip was soaked completely with paint. We were ready to start fixing up some damaged areas of the car!

We tried a few different areas of the car including a small chip on the front fender and a larger area on the rear bumper of the car and were quite successful. All we needed to do was prep the pen as mentioned above and color in the affected areas. The paint worked quite well but we did manage to release too much paint at times by pressing on the pen a bit too much on the smaller areas. This was easily curbed after using the pen to correct a few blemishes.

Once you have colored in the dings in your car, you’ll probably want to go back and put on another layer or two of paint in order to “raise” the paint level up to match your car. The directions on the pen advise waiting five minutes but through experience we would advise waiting thirty minutes prior to applying additional coast of paint. We experience some problems when only waiting the five minutes described on the pen but had no problems after waiting 30 minutes.

A few days later, we took some time to survey the areas where we had applied the fixes and had to actively look for them from any distance. When looking up close, you can still make out some of the depressions in the paint but this can most likely be fixed through applying additional coasts to the areas in question.

Overall, we were very delighted with the results from the AutoSharp pen for the $16.99 price tag. If you are looking to touch up your paint without taking a trip to the body shop and are not an absolute perfectionist, you should definitely give the AutoSharp pen a try. The pen is not a perfect solution (especially for those who could never color inside the lines) but it performs as well, if not better, than you would expect. It certainly makes your car look 100% better from a step or two away from your car and we will be using it again for sure.

To give the AutoSharp pen a try and save five dollars off the purchase price go to http://www.autovisuals.com/ and place an order using the coupon discount code E46.