Does Fix-It Work?

The Claim:
"Tired of your car taking a beating? It gets dinged, scratched, and nicked—and you pay the price!" Fix-It "instant scratch remover" repairs, fills and seals pesky blemishes in any color car. "Like magic, the scratch disappears right before your eyes." Resins fill the scratch on contact and UV hardeners cure in the sunlight with "no sanding, tools or hard labor." Just apply and let dry. "The scratch has met its match."
The Test:
Attempting to "fix" several shallow and deep scratches in the original silver paint job on a 1996 SUV.
The Verdict:
This tube of clear coat only works on superficial scratches. On deeper, more noticeable damage, it can produce satisfactory results when combined with traditional scratch-removal techniques.
The Details:
As explained in PM's How to Fix A Scratch Car Clinic a few years back, a car's paint job is capped off with the clear coat. Beneath that lies the paint color, then the primer, then the steel. Most of the scratches in our decade-old silver SUV were light nicks in the clear coat, which Fix-It could fill with ease. That's not surprising, as the product is essentially a tube of clear-coat resins packaged like a marker. You stroke it on, fill the damage, and the formula hardens beneath sunlight. The problem is that deeper scratches in the paint color—the more noticeable ones that most of us would want to disappear—require more work than Fix-It alone can provide.
For those types of scratches, the proper repair would involve some of the steps from our Car Clinic story mentioned above. Let's say the scratch goes into the color, but not through it. First, spread the Fix-It compound along the scratch, and allow it to harden. If the Fix-It clear-coat layer stands proud of the surrounding area—and it will—wet-sand it back with 1000- or 2000-grit wet-or-dry sandpaper. Then polish out the sandpaper scratches with rubbing compound, and buff smooth with a polishing wheel. These steps should leave the scratch relatively undetectable. If, on the other hand, the scratch goes through the color and into the primer or the metal, don't bother with Fix-It. You'll need to spray fresh primer, color and clear coat and blend it all properly.
But our deep scratches didn't have time for all that. As the ad said, we could just Fix-It and forget it, right? Wrong. Once treated, the scratches in the paint appeared to have been highlighted with clear fingernail polish. Still, by sealing the scratch, even improperly, we had stopped moisture infiltration, which would have eventually caused the clear coat to lose adhesion at the edges of the scratch. The silver lining in this clear-coat cloud reminded us of our semi-success with Mighty Putty: It doesn't look like nothing happened, but it looks better than it did.