Bodywork repair
If you use your car day to day you'll know what a battle it is to maintain the paintwork in good condition. Even new cars or recently resprayed cars attract the odd stone chip or scratch. There are things you can do though to avoid such damage and successfully remove these bodywork blemishes ... read on to find out a few of my tips and tricks that i have found out over the years.
Stonechips
Prevention is the best method here : simply overtake everything you can so there is never a car in front of you. Seriously though ... maintaining a decent distance from cars in front will help to mimimise front end stone chip damage massively, following HGV's at a distance of 3 metres will garauntee you stone chip damage. If you use your car on the road at all though sadly this is unavoidable damage in some form and will occur mostly on the front end. I use a touch up brush to fill the small chips. They must be treated as soon as they occur or corrosion will set in where chips are on metal panels. You can use a cutting compound or liquid like T-cut to feather the new paint into the chip recess for a good result once it is dry. I have successfully used products for repairing chips called a "Chip kit" in the past. They are basically a lip stick made of coloured wax which is rubbed over the chip until wax is left in the recess. You then polish away the excess. The result is perfect and you really cannot see the chips but it’s not a permanent fix and will need re-doing some months later. They come in various basic colours to match your paint.
Scratches
Again almost un-avoidable in some form or another. If the scratches are very fine and shallow and haven't actually gone through the paint to the primer you can use a cutting compound or something like T-cut to simply smooth them out. Use small circular motions and be gentle, the scratches will disappear. I have tried the coloured polishes for scratches and while they are reasonable quality products as far as polishing goes they don't seem to do much on scratches. If the scratch is deep it will need touching up with a brush or the panel spraying usually. Touching up scratches never looks that good but if you feather the paint down with a cutting compound it can look reasonable. Here's another tip which seems to work well. I have used this method a number of times and it looks good. Get a permanent marker pen (felt tip) the same colour more or less as the car and run it along the scratch to colour the primer, you don't get the scar like appearance of paint from a touch up and the colour of the primer is no longer drawing attention to the scratch.
Dents
I can think of virtually nothing that is more annoying than returning to your motor in a car park to find a dent in the door where some tosser has opened a door into it. These dents are normally right in the middle of a panel where they are totally visible as well. I recently had a dent like this in the middle of one of the rear quarter panels on the 309 and I got a company called "Dent Master" to come out and sort it out. Basically they reckon that providing there is suitable access behind the panel by removing interior trim they can normally repair a dent of this nature to near perfect condition as long as the paint isn't broken. Obviously large dents will need professional repair but this guy came to my work, removed the rear passenger side pockets etc and smoothed the dent out using special hardware. The result is near perfect, you cannot see anything without really looking very hard at the exact area close up with the right light. They charge around £50 and will de-dent a whole panel for that price regardless of number of dents. Whether this kind of repair is possible does depend on where the dent it and the extent of the damage but it's a good option. Dents that cannot be sorted in this way will need filling and the panel re-sprayed or the panel replaced.
Corrosion
Well nobody likes to see it or admit to it but sadly there is a time when the road salt and damp winter conditions will take their toll. It's best to avoid it to start with to be honest by repairing chips and scratches without delay using underseal or Wax Oil type products on the underside of the car and Wax Oil inside doors will help in the long run no end. If you do get rust under the paintwork you must act fast and be thorough. Common places where rust first appears are sills often in a seam where panels are welded together, all cars are different though but almost all follow a pattern with rust first appearing in certain places on certain models. Vauxhalls are renowned for rear wheel arch lips rusting through. Not a bad idea to find out what the weaknesses are on your model of car and give that area priority treatment with prevention products such as Wax Oil or under sealers. You can repair rust yourself, not easy to make it look good on a visible area but in the past when i have found rust in non-visible areas I dug the rust and paint out with a knife blade and used a rust acid treatment to neutralise the rust, then smoothed the area with emery paper and painted with rust primer followed by 2 top coats of paint. This isn't perfect but in a seam or such like this it's hardly noticeable and is worth the effort. You can do the same sort of thing on door edges, sills and under the wheel arches etc. You must make sure you get all the rust where it is travelling in veins under the paintwork otherwise the dreaded rust will be quick to return. Make sure the area is clean and dry before painting the primer on and thoroughly dried between coats.
Dis-colouration
If you don't regularly polish the paintwork it can suffer from dulling. This is because the surface of the paint oxidises but it can often be repaired. A heavy duty thick polish will often be enough but if it isn't use a cutting compound to reveal a fresh layer of paintwork, always polish after doing this or the paint will be bare to the elements and quickly go back to poor condition. When using T-cut or other cutting compounds be gentle and work with small circular motions covering the whole affected area, wipe dry and polish for a gleaming as new look !
Pictures