Re: tiny rock chips
Because rock chips are a divot or low spot in the paint, (paint's missing), compounding or polishing won't fix the problem it will just remove the good paint surrounding the chip.
The only real fix is to somehow add replacement paint to the chipped area and this is usually harder to do and make it look great than most people think.
Most people want to fill in the rock chips and make it look like,
- There were never any rock chips.
- There's no visual imperfection after the chip has been filled.
Most of the time what happens is a person will use the built in paint brush in the lid of a bottle of touch-up paint to fill in the chip and because the brush head is large and the chipped area is tiny you go from a chipped area that's missing paint to a blob sitting on top of the paint.
So while the chip is filled in you now have an unsightly blob. The next thing the person will want to do is to sand the blob flat and then somehow remove their sanding marks. This can get complicated because compared to touch-up paint, most modern clear coats tend to be much harder. The result is after sanding it will be easy to remove the sanding marks out of the touch-up paint but difficult to completely remove all the sanding marks, (scratches), out of the clearcoat paint.
Also, if you buff to hard on the repaired area often times you actually pull the touch-up paint right out of the rock chip so now you're back to where you started only not only do you have the rock chip but you now also have sanding marks in the clear paint surrounding the rock chip.
Fact is you can make rock-chip repair as complicated as you like and sometimes the more time and work you put into it doesn't net any better results then simply dabbing in a very tiny amount of touch-up paint and then walking away.
I've seen the Dr.Color Chip system demonstrated in person and was quite frankly amazed at how well it worked and it actually looked pretty easy to use.
Dr. ColorChip: Automotive Paint Chip Repair Systems
Another option would be to find a Pro Detailer that offered the Dr.ColorChip repair system as a service and simply let them do it for you.
