A stray tree branch, a runaway shopping cart or an angry girlfriend... they can all wreak havoc on your car's paint job. But one product says you don't need to pay a repair shop to fix the damage. You can do it yourself with Scratch-dini. Consumer expert Amy Davis asked the professionals at Apollo Paint & Body in Southwest Houston to try it out for "As Seen On TV Tuesday."
"Just use a tiny bit of our revolutionary formula and, like magic, you'll buff away the scratch in seconds," the announcer claims on the Scratch-dini commercial.
Apollo manager Craig Fitzsimmons tried to recreate some of the tests in the commercial. He tried it on three scratches, starting with a big one that looked a lot like the scratch on the front of the Scratch-dini box.
"You can even see black right there," said Fitzsimmons, pointing to the first big scratch we picked for the test. "That means it's gone through the clear. It's gone through the base coat. It's all the way down to the bumper."
Fitzsimmons was skeptical; and his apprehension was right on. Scratch-dini had no effect on the big scratch. When he applied the product to a medium-sized scratch, part of it disappeared, but not all of it.
Finally, when he put the product on a tiny scratch, barely visible through our camera lens, Scratch-dini did the job. If that is worth $9.99 to you, you might be happy with the product; but Fitzsimmons says Scratch-dini doesn't perform as advertised.
"The way they sell it on TV, they say this is a cure all.. it does everything. But in reality, it's for minor, minor scratches," explained Fitzsimmons.
He said if you run your fingernail over a scratch and it catches on the paint, that scratch is most likely too deep for Scratch-dini to work.