Stone chips
Stone chip damage is a very common feature in cars. This is a particular problem on the front end – front bumper and bonnet. This is due to small stones that hit like tiny bullets on the body and damage the paint work. These stone chips cause deep damage to the paintwork, exposing the metal sometimes, creating risk of rust, paint flaking in surrounding areas and causing significant expense to repair in future.
Stone chip damage to bodywork is particularly worse in winter months, as salt spreaders spread grit mixed with salt. These contain small chips of stones that help prevent cars from skidding and slipping on black ice. But when cars travel on these, some can fly off like tiny bullets on to other vehicles, causing damage to the paint work. The speed of the stone chips themselves, added to the speed of the car travelling behind, doubles the speed and makes it fast enough to cause deep wounds to the paintwork.
Stone chips damage repair:
Stone chips damage to bumpers and hood or bonnet of cars is one of the most common forms of minor damage. This can cause damage to paintwork fairly deep and expose the metal. If left unattended, it can cause rusting, flaking of paint and eventually damage to metal, making repairs very expensive.
The front bumpers are made of plastic, so the damage is different and so is the repair work, as the rusting risk does not exist. The key for metal repair is to first clear the wounded and exposed metal with rust prevention and rust removal methods.This step is not required for plastics, instead plastic adhesion and plastic filler work is required for the repair work.
Stone chip damage is typically a very deep damage to paint work, but also very small. The main issue is that they are typically numerous and in different parts of the front facing areas of any vehicle. The large number and depth means that each one has to be dealt with and repaired separately, rather than treating the whole front part of the vehicle as one repair work.
This involves separate procedures for stone chips on metal and plastic. For metal, the first step is to put some rust removal and rust prevention chemicals that also promote adhesion for further layers of work. For plastics, it involves chemicals that promote adhesion and repair to plastics for further layers to not peel off and bond properly.
The sooner stone chips damage to any vehicle is repaired, the better. This is because more than likely some metal is exposed and can easily start rusting. Once rusting starts, it spreads quickly underneath the paint and the paintwork above starts flaking. After this stage, it no longer remains a small job of touching up and repairing stone chips, but instead become a work of removing all flaking paint, exposing all rusting metal areas, treating the rusting metal, and if metal is too weak, then replacing the metal first. All this can quickly become very expensive.
- Number of panels involved
- Number of stone chips damage
- Depth of damages
- Body colour and finish of the vehicle
- Any rust damage or not
- Damage to plastic or not
- Overall condition of the vehicle
Our repair process:
Depending on the stone chips being on plastics or metal, we first identify and mark the damages and make a numbered count of them, so that we can work on each one without ignoring, forgetting any steps for any one of them. We then go to each one in a serial number pattern, going back to the first one each time after getting to the last one.
We do this separately for plastics and for metals, as the procedures are somewhat different for each one of them. The following procedure is basically the same for both of them, after rust repair work has been carried out for metals and plastic repair and bonding work has been carried out for plastics.
- We first sand and prepare the damaged area using fillers, ensure that the metal is well protected. We do this multiple times to ensure a perfectly smooth and well covered surface to work on.
- We then apply a couple of coats of primer, to ensure good bond with base coat, we sand again, ensuring that all tiny pinholes are filled.
- The base coat is colour matched using a sophisticated photospectrometer to create the exact colour match paint. We apply three layers of base coat and prepare the paintwork for further protection work.
- We then apply two layers of clear coat to protect the paint work and then polish the freshly restored surface.
Other damage repair services we offer:
| Shallow scratches repair | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Upholstery repair | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Leather restoration | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Headlight restoration | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Dents repair | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Stone chips damage repair | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Windshield chips and crack repair | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Full car polishing including shallow scratches removal, small car size | From ̶€̶19̶9̶ Offer €99 |
| Body panel scratches repair | From ̶€̶39̶9̶ Offer €199 |
| Alloy wheels restoration | From ̶€̶39̶9̶ Offer €199 |
| Bumper restoration | From ̶€̶39̶9̶ Offer €199 |
| Broken plastics restoration, also dashboards | From ̶€̶39̶9̶ Offer €199 |
*Offer prices are temporary and in conjunction with coupon codes only.
We can restore most minor damages to various car parts, from body panels, plastics, leather and upholstery, to windshields, headlights, bumpers and alloy wheels. We restore these to a condition that would turn back the clock and you would feel as if the damage never happened. It is much cheaper than replacing whole parts, good for the environment and pocket. It retains the value of the vehicle as well as prevents further damage by neglect.