How to Repair Chipped Automotive Paint

Annoyingly, paint chips seem to always strike cars when you least expect them to. New cars always seem more susceptible, as well. Repairing these paint chips is a relatively easy process to undertake, requiring only basic knowledge of painting processes. The most important thing to remember is that automotive paint jobs today are overwhelmingly basecoat/clearcoat finishes. This means that there is a layer of paint on the car’s metal surface, and a clear protective coat sprayed on top of this. Without this clear top layer, you may find that your chip repair doesn’t quite look right. In fact, the touchup paint you use may not match at all, regardless of whether it was the paint supplied by the vehicle manufacturer or not.

To begin the process of repairing a paint chip on your car, look at the center of the chip. Do you see metal or any surface rust? If so, then use a piece of sandpaper or a nail file to scuff the surface of the bare metal until it has a shiny surface again. You don’t want to apply touch-up paint over rust, or the rust will simply continue to form underneath the repair. Cleaning it up will prevent future rust from forming. If the chip doesn’t extend further than the clear top coat of the vehicle, on the other hand, the repair process becomes quite simple. To begin, sand the surface gently to remove any additional chipped clear coat.

Next, fill the chip with touch-up paint. It’s generally best to use the brush for this, as it will give you a nice, big glob of paint that will easily fill the chip. Just touch the very end of the glob of paint to the chip, and the paint will transfer. Let it dry like that for about an hour before you continue. Note, however, that you don’t need to use touch-up paint on a chip that doesn’t extend below the clear coat. You can skip to the next step for that.

The bottle of clear coat touch up is similar to the touch-up paint in how it is applied. You will notice that after the paint dried, it sunk slightly below the surface of the clear coat. This is exactly what you want to happen. Now, you can fill that slight indentation with clear coat. As with the paint, allow the clear coat to dry before you continue. It shouldn’t take more than about an hour for the clear to harden and dry.

The clear coat won’t dry the same way that the paint did. Instead of drying flat on the surface, it will dry with a slight bulge. You’ll want to use a piece of 2,000-grit sandpaper to file down this bulge, but not with your fingers. Instead, wrap the sandpaper around a popcicle stick or a paint stick, and use that to sand the surface. This will leave you with a nice, flat repair area where you’ll be hardly able to tell that there was any damage to the paint at all.

When the repair area is flattened, use a clean rag and a small dab of polishing compound to polish up the sanded clear coat. Ideally, you will be removing all traces of the sand scratches and leaving behind a shining surface on your vehicle, with the paint chip nowhere in evidence.


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