560SEC stone chip touch up

Over the years my 560SEC has acquired quite a lot of stone chips on the front of the car.   I understand the previous owner was in semi-rural Queensland so there may have been some gravel or unsealed roads in there.   Today I applied a stop gap fix until I can address the problem properly.   Most of the stone chips were in the front panel under the headlights.   These panels are removeable, so eventually when I have the rust under the rear screen fixed, i’ll have this panel repainted too.    That repair will be a couple of years away, so today’s task was some stone chip touch up.

Autobarn will sell a little pot of touch up paint with a small brush that is matched to the car’s original colour.   This was the perfect solution for my stone chip touch up job.   While the pot will not match perfectly due to fade, it will make the car look better close up.    I own two cars in 929 Nautical blue, so the little pot of paint is a good investment.

Recently I fixed one of the cladding panels with a colour matched aerosol from Autobarn.   You can have the colours in either format, depending on what you need.

I started by masking off the bumper bar near the affected area.   Later on, I found that it probably wasn’t necessary as I didn’t spill any of the paint.   I suspect if I had not masked off the area, I would have though.    There is a little brush inside the cap that I used to gently apply paint to each chip.   I don’t think I did the greatest job in the world.   My skills are not in fine work like this.   I still think it is better than all those chips.

I found that pushing backwards against the normal direction of the brush was better to get the paint into each chip.   When I used the brush as normal, it left more of a brush mark and not all the paint went into the chip.   The worst ones did require a little brushing due to their size.

As well as this panel, there were quite a few areas that needed stone chip touch up around the grille.   I used the same method and fixed those.   Again, if you look closely you can still see where it was fixed.  From 1-2 meters away you can hardly tell.

I will check again in the next couple of days to see how it has dried and if I need to touch up any of my touch ups.   Overall, for an hour’s work and a $20 paint pot I am pretty happy with the result.