After washing my car at the weekend I decided to give it a quick polish. However when I came to cleaning it off I noticed there were a few stone chips on my bonnet and wings.

In the past (on my old cars) I've used a touch up pen set to sort them out but they've never really blended well. I was hoping besides getting the wing sprayed again is there any tips people can suggest I use?

Also my car is a Fabia vRS SE - what touch up kit would I need for it?

Got about 8 on the o/s of my car & loads on the front between headlights & grille.

There are a couple of stone chip repair firms around my area, the one i'm considering is Chips Away, any one used them before, & is the work of a high standard? Paint colour is Race Blue.

I am also considering taking it back to the dealer, I have had it 3 weeks & I'm sure most of them were present when I picked it up, I pointed them out to the sales girl, & was told "What do you expect, it's a 3 year old car!! She offered me a touch up stick, which I declined, as if I do it it will look awful, I want a proffesional job doing on it really.

Fact of life with VAG paint being so hard, and panels being zinc coated. Easiest way to fix them, is to buy a touch up kit, which consists of paint and lacquer. Mix paint and lacquer together 50/50, and use a cocktail stick, or needle to fill the chip. Try to get the repair as level as possible. Leave paint to fully harden over 24 hours, then cut back with Farecla G3, restore shine with AG SRP, and then wax of choice.

Other options include wet sanding the touch in blobs with 2000 wet and dry, then 4000 wet and dry to reduce the sanding marks, then compound, polish and wax. Not for the faint hearted, and you need a rotary machine to do this kind of work.

Even if you had a front end respray, the chips will come back with use, unless you can find a bodyshop, who can barrier coat the old paint, then use a better paint to respray the front end. My choice would be 2 Pack.

Thanks for your advice, went to dealership today, didn't get anywhere though. They said if I went to their body shop, it would cost me a fortune, so I asked about Chips Away, one guy on the service desk, said they used to use them in Ipswich where he worked, & they were quite good, free estimates, & they come to you, home or work.

So I might give them a try!!

The Chipsaway agent in Milton Keynes didn't want to do stone-chips, which seemed odd. They just touch in the chips like you would do yourself. It's pretty poor actually. They make their money on paintless dent removal, plastic bumper repairs and polishing out scratches apparently.

The best results I've seen were in a thread where someone bought some premixed paint and blobbed it into the chip so it stood proud, then polished it down flat. That was near-on invisible to the eye, especially after a couple of coats of wax. It was so good I'm tempted to get them to do mine.

Back to the old drawing board then! Trouble with doing it myself, is I have a very shakey hand, when doing anything fiddley, so tend to be a bit clumsey!

Thanks for your reply, i'll have to have another think about it.

these guys do really good little kits , i'm doing the wifes race blue octy next week

http://www.paints4u.com/

I've just brought a Fab vRS which has a few stone chips too.

I used dr colorchip (Dr. ColorChip: Automotive Paint Chip Repair Systems) on my car last year with excellent results so want to get some of this again. Only problem is its £65 delivered from the states... however I had a play about with prices and if we could get a group buy of 10 people it would come down to about £32 (although I guess there may be some import tax and fluctuationin the $/£) but would anyone be interested in a group buy?? I know this forum had one recently but surely theres another 10 or so people which may be interested?? (Even if we only get 4 of us it comes down to about £41 each)