My experience with LANGKA blob eliminator (Review)

At the end of last Fall while I was parked outside a friends house, an egg was thrown at my car which hit the drivers side door . If your familiar with the dynamics of an egg hitting a car,  you know that they don’t just leave goo, and that the egg shell actually damages the paint.

The damage an egg leaves is very distinct in that it creates a series of concentric circles in the paint. This is caused by how the egg shell collapses in sections as it hits the car. Even though we may think that an egg is quite weak, the shell is actually very hard and has an abrasive property which can really dig into the paint.

Figure 1: An airborne egg.

Figure 2: Egg hits car. The initial part of the shell fractures and is pushed into the egg creating a jagged circle at the point of impact. The damage to the paint is shown to the right.

Figure 3: Initial jagged circle breaks off and is pushed into the egg creating another wider circle. This creates the concentric rings which is distinct to egg damage.

Luckily, the egg that hit my car was not thrown very hard, but it was thrown hard enough to leave some of these circles. Here are pictures of the actual damage. I found that my camera had trouble focusing on such a small and reflective surface; instead, it would focus on everything in the reflection. This is where the damage is located on the car. The black tape was an attempt to give the camera something to focus on:

Here is a closeup of the damage. Its very hard to see unless its in the right light, and even harder to take pictures of. I have circled the damage to help you find it, click to enlarge:

Since the Incident, I learned about a product called “Blob eliminator” from the Langka company. This product is advertised to be a chemical reducer that only effects touch-up paint and allows you to smooth out a touch-up’ed area. I figured that I would give this a try and bought their $40 repair kit and also ordered Nissan touch-up paint in my color.

The kit comes with 3 bottles containing the Blob Eliminator, pre-paint cleaner, and paint sealant. It also includes a plastic card the size of a credit card, a piece of cloth they call “Microfiber” (doesn’t look like any microfiber I have ever seen and looks more like bed sheet material) and 3 “Micro” brushes.

I think this kit is a waste and even though I haven’t used the paint sealant yet, I hear its doesn’t do much. I would just order the Blob Eliminator from them and use a credit card or drivers license wrapped in an old bed sheet (which they even say is ok to use). The micro brushes work all right, but I found that the brush the touch-up paint comes with worked just fine. You can use a streak-less cleaner like glass cleaner and alcohol instead of their “pre-paint prep” which isn’t very good.

Anyway, after I cleaned the area I applied the touch up paint in little dabs to fill in the egg shell damage. It looked like this:

I learned that its important to let the paint dry all the way through; otherwise, the Blob Eliminator works too quickly and removes all of the touch-up paint. I started with the Blob Eliminator using their technique of wrapping a card in cloth to whittled down the high spots like if it were a sanding block. I found that this method does not provide much feedback and is easy to go to far, again removing all of the touch-up paint. I found the best method was to just wrap your finger in the cloth and just rub down the blob which allows you to feel it getting smaller under your finger. Then, when I had a very little high spot left, I used the card method a few last swipes to get it as close to perfect as possible.

My end results were so-so. I found that this product does not work very well on chips this small since its so easy to go to far and remove all of the paint.

(Click to enlarge the photo)

I did find that it worked well on a touch-up repair that the previous owner did. This was a much larger and deeper chip which took the paint better. I was able to completely remove the old repair and redo it and fill only the damaged area.

The color is off, but that’s to be expected when trying to match metallic or multi-stage paint. But, this looks much better than no repair and the metal is protected underneath.

Final Thoughts:

I think this product did an O.K. job but was difficult to use in my situation. I think there is a few variables involved which can determine the success you might have. If the touch-up paint you’re using is less responsive to the blob remover, it will be easier to whittle away and reduces the chance of removing too much at one time. The size of the damage is also important: if the damaged area is to large, it will be very hard to smooth out and not remove too much paint from the center of the repair. Shallow damage is also hard to repair since you will probably just wipe everything away. There is also a learning curve to doing this, so expect to do it a few times before you get it right.

Even though this is an expensive product – $20 for a 2 oz bottle – I expect this little bottle to last me a very long time since a little of it goes a long way. The best part is, if your repair looks worse than what you started with, you can just remove it.

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