This is a thread off Detailing World to help people with Stone chips, Before you ask it is possible to do it without a Dual Action/Rotary polisher, it just takes a lot of elbow grease. The key to repairing stone chips is the correct paint, don't cut corners as you want it to match!
A common sight on everyone's bonnet is stone chips unless you've just had it re-sprayed but even then they are still inevitable!
So after spotting a few on mine I thought I would have a go at repairing them after reading a couple of repair guides. Firstly I got hold of some touch up paint from Paints4U you can alternatively just buy a touch up stick from the stealers but for the same price i got a 100ml tin of paint and 30ml clear lacquer which was a perfect colour match too it also came with a fine artists brush.
I also got some IsoPropyl alcohol to clean out all the dirt, crap, polish & wax from the stone chips, once this was done i went round filling the chips with paint and making sure the paint filled the chip and not the area around it as this can easily be done if you use a brush thats too thick you need to fill the chip so that the paint is raised over the area of the chip.
once left to dry the bonnet looked like this with blobs of paint
the wet & dry paper I used was Meguiars unigrit 2500
The next job was to wet sand the blobs of paint down to the same level as the existing paint and the best way i found to do this and keep the repairs to the local area was to wrap a small bit of sandpaper around the end of a flat piece of plastic (aka a bicyle inner tube remover!) or a pencil and gently rub down the raised paint and then level it out with the rest of the surface.
i used plenty of water with fairy liquid which foamed up nicely and acted as a good lubricant and also soaked the sandpaper in some fairy liquid before hand.
some nice sanding marks afterwards!
these were easily removed using my porter cable polisher with a "4 lake & country orange light cut pad & Menzerna Intensive polish, the whole bonnet was then followed up with Menzerna Final Finish Polish (P085RD) with a "6 Sonus SFX blue finishing pad and 2 coats of Collinite 476s wax.
if you don't have a porter cable you can easily remove the sanding scratches by hand using 3M Perfect-It III fine cut compound
i can't see the chips anymore!
