Filling and Repairing Paint Chips

Whether you're assembling a car or driving a car, sooner or later, you're gonna get chips in the paint. On our 57 here, we started out, we set, we put in the door jamb striker, and we didn't have it set quite right and we ended up actually getting a chip in the paint. And knowing how to handle these, it's not a case where we gotta, oh, it's the end of the world. We just have to go in, touch these up and sand them out. So let's kinda go through the process and actually fix this chip here. And we've got a couple others that we'll be working on as well. To start, we'll get this chip area cleaned up. And to do that, we'll get some wax and grease remover. There's several different kinds of this on the market. It's just a matter of going in and wiping it down. This ensures that if any dirt, any finger oils or anything got on this area after it was chipped, that we have a clean surface on which to apply paint. And with one part of the towel, we'll actually wipe it down with the solvent and then wipe it dry with another corner here. And as soon as we're convinced we have this good and clean, then we can apply some paint. For paint, I've taken some of the paint that we actually used to mix the car with hardener and put it on our bondo board here. This is basically a board that we use to apply bondo with tear offs on it. This gives us a way to mix the paint with the hardener and get it on the brush. Once I have the brush loaded up good, I can come in here and just, again, it's not rocket science. What we wanna do is get a good layer of paint in there to fill that void up. And once that's on, we'll let that dry. And then we'll move to the next step, which will be sanding and buffing out the actual chips. On this door, I also had a couple of chips, and for the purpose of this video, we don't wanna watch paint dry, but I did have a couple of chips down here beneath the door handle that I touched up a couple of days ago, gave it plenty of time to dry now. And we're gonna go on to the next step after painting in the chips, and that'll be sanding these down and buffing these up. To start, we're gonna mask off the chrome, make sure we don't sand any of this while we're fixing the chips. And this is, it's important to get a good, get that tape right on the edge. Once we have the chrome taped off so we know we're not gonna damage any of that, we're gonna come in and we're gonna just sand the tops of those areas that I touched up with paint. And when I touched them up with paint, I made sure that after the paint dried, that that surface was above the surface of the paint next to it. And that meant applying a couple of coats before it cured. And so, now, using a paint stick, and basically this is just a wooden paint stick, we'll use that as the backer for the sandpaper. The reason you wanna use a real solid backer, you don't wanna use a rubber sanding block or something like that, because that will flex and you'll actually start sanding the area. You'll actually start sanding the area around the chip. And we just wanna be focused on sanding just the tops of the chip at this point. So we're gonna be using 2000 grit wet or dry paper on just a regular paint stick like you'd get at the hardware store. And just start working the very tops of those chips. And it'll take a little bit of time, just because you're working with really fine grit at this point. Yeah, you could use a heavier grit and get through it a lot faster, but you'll run the risk of damaging it a lot quicker too. So by going with 2000 grit, we can focus on getting the tops of these chips sanded smooth with the rest of the finish, without damaging the rest of the finish around it. You wanna keep a rag handy while you're doing this. And as you start to sand, you'll start finding that you get high and low areas. You'll see better where you're gonna need to sand more. When I'm wet sanding like this, I always add a few drops of dish soap in the water. This helps the water break the surface tension so it doesn't just beat up on the finish. And also it cleans while we're actually sanding it, cleans the surface and makes sure that the surface is good and clean so when we go to buff out, there's no silicones or waxes or anything for the buffer to ride on top of, as opposed to buffing the paint itself. Once you're happy with how smooth you've got it down there, then now it's time for us to go in and actually buff, buff out all the sanding scratches and bring the paint back. Okay, and that concludes our paint chip repair. What we've done is we've filled the chip, sanded it down, and then buffed the finish so it all matches back to the way it was originally. You can use the same principle, same process on any part of your car.