anyone have rock chip repair advice?

[jdonovannavy]

well since its starting to get warmer out i have been wanting to clean up the car a little bit. i was wondering if anyone here had any experience on fixing rock chips around the hood, front bumper area. please give me some ideas on how to go about repairing them. please let me know what you used, how long it took, cost (etc). if you have any before and after pictures that would be great too. thanks for your help!

[Mike-in-Orange]

This can be very tedious work and if you don't do it right it has the chance of almost looking worse when you're done.

Basically you want to clean the area with a wax & grease remover and then slightly dilute your touch up paint with some lacquer thinner and use a very fine tipped artists brush to apply the paint to the rock chip. Apply a little at a time and let it dry, repeating this until it builds up above the surrounding area. Some light wet sanding will level it and then you need to compound the area to remove the sanding marks. Do NOT use a rubbing compound by hand because you'll just screw up the surrounding paint.

Doesn't sound like a ton of fun at this point, does it??

You might also want to look into the Langka system (LANGKA Paint Chip and Scratch Repair) and give that a shot. I've seen it used with decent results, but the best results still included some wet sanding and compounding by machine to remove the sanding marks.

In all honesty though, if you aren't real comfortable with wet sanding and machine compounding (most people only think they know what they're doing), I'd probably leave it to a pro.

[Justin@Adams]

Hey jdonovannavy,

Like Mike said if you don't have experience with this, there is a good chance that it will come out worse then before.

I second leaving it to the Pro's!

Let use know if you have any other Questions?

Thanks,