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Building off of #37's "teaching old dogs new tricks!" I offer the following. My wife's "fun" car is a 1978 VW Convertible. It is a Champaign edition car that has, at the time of this writing, just under 20,000 miles. Three owners in two families. Here it is right after we got it home, before any cleaning up: click on the thumbnail for a bigger image.
This is a fun car that lived a pretty lively first year of about 15,000 miles from the first owner. My mother-in-law bought the car in 1979 and put on just over 4000 miles till 2004. An average of about 160 miles a year. The car was always garaged, but not really taken care of as a collectible, it was just a fun car. I have done the first "detail" of the car in many years, and it revealed several small dings that paintless dent repair will get out. It also revealed hundreds of little chips in the front of the car and numerous scrapes on the sides from parking lots and just having people walk around it for 25 years. The color is Medium Red I think, but it was the special color that a complete line of cars in 1978 were painted that were called the "Champaign" editions. Thus we named the car Bubbles. Seems to fit a VW. That Medium Red Champaign edition shows every chip like a searchlight is focused on them. The front of the car looked like it had a shotgun blasted at it. (60 mph speeds on the highway will do that). Normally I recommend doing touch up paint by filling in the chips till the touch-up paint is higher than the surrounding area and then maybe lightly sanding the new paint to match and then buffing. This works but is WORK if you know what I mean. The typical quickie job involves little dabs of paint and always they will cover about 100% to 200% MORE than the actual chip. Leaving the paint looking like it has measles. This is an improvement from a distance, but looks bad up close. As I settled in on Fathers day 2005 to do some work on these chips and scrapes, I felt that a better way must be possible. So I started laying in some paint and while it was still fresh I just wiped off the spot with my finger, leaving just the paint in the chip! This worked, but my hands would be red forever. So I used a cloth, but that smeared the paint so I used a solvent to clean the area up. That led to my ultimate solution. I used my Wurth Clean Solve, which is a mild solvent that won't hurt dried/cured paint, but will remove wax and also soft paint. Of course you use this to clean the car and chips before you start laying in paint, but I hadn't used it after. So I did about 3-4 Square inches of chips (on this car that would be about 50! in some areas of the hood) and then I took a clean cloth, wet it with the clean solve and lightly wiped the entire area. First wipe took off most of the paint that had gone outside the chip itself. Another wipe softened the paint that had dried a bit more. Third or fourth wipe removed all but the paint INSIDE the chip. WOW! I had a repair that was almost invisible. Of course any paint laid on chips that had portions sticking up (dents from the inside out for instance, or chips where paint had raised up a little) could not be treated this way. But the result didn't look like the car had measles. Here is the car with the left half (as you look at the picture) of the hood treated and probably 98% of the chips "fixed" with a few still needing more work. Note near the bottom of the hood where I started doing the right side but stopped to take the picture. Click on the thumbnail to see the big view:
I am very happy with this outcome. The car up close looks very good. The chips are still visible, but only on VERY close examination. And this doesn't take a long time. You can be sloppy about laying in the paint, and just wipe off any mistakes and the part that isn't needed. The final part of the project will be to wait till everything is cured, and use my glaze to shine the area again, and wax to protect it. This isn't a replacement for repainting by any means, but it sure looks better than typical touch-up work, and is fairly easy and quick. Oh, and I was amazed at how good the paint shop matched the paint. A pint was $38, but A typical "touch up" bottle would have been long gone before this job was done. I used a small art brush and kept the paint fairly thin so it would flow. Buy some thinner if you don't have it on hand. Keep having fun with your cars and trucks.
Don Mallinson, President |
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