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Paint Touch Ups |
Introduction |
Every enthusiast has suffered from this problem: a beautiful, blemish free paint job on their car; a long highway cruise; an inadvertent stone kicked up from a lovely semi; and a harsh, garish stone chip on the nose or hood of their baby. Generally, we write these off as 'the price' we have to pay to drive our cars. And as time goes by, these chips and scratches continue to accumulate until they get so bad we have to pay a professional to respray the panel.
The good news is: It doesn't have to be this way. If you're interested in learning how to maintain your finishes and repair these chips, read on. :-) |
Procedure |
First, buy your touchup paint from GM.
Here's what I do to touch up scratches (even deep ones down to the metal or glass), if you're patient you'll find that on a scale of 1-100 (100 being the best) you'll get a 90-95 quality touchup. Standard colors (red, black, white, etc.) are the easiest to do. Keep in mind though that metallics are challenging to even the pros, so don't be too much of a perfectionist on your results. Take pictures of the scratches or stone chips before you start. As you're polishing and start to feel you could've done better, refer to the original photos, you'll find you probably did okay. I use the 5-foot rule on metallics. If I can't see the touchup from 5-foot, then the job is acceptable. You'll find that basically you have three choices:
You can do options 1 & 2 yourself. Option 3 requires someone competent in mixing paint and operating the sprayer. For stone chips and deep scratches, I recommend option 1. I follow these steps when I do them:
Practice on an out-of-the-way area before you do this project in earnest. With a little bit of patience and some practice you'll find you can get pretty good with this. |
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