*sigh*

driving on 280 north in san jose... hear something loud hit my car... i start to worry.... get to my final desination and check my car... *phew* it's all goood!

I check again this morning and see some bird crap on the side of my driver's seat door. try to scratch it off =/.... yeah, i know it's nasty but it's my Mini!

anyway, find out it won't scratch off because it's chipped paint. so now i have a little piece of chipped paint that stands out on my otherwise perfect door... what a birthday present, huh?

I need a fix on my DS MCS 2007 =(. any ideas?

 

How large is this chip ? I assume the size of a bird dropping but just how big a bird are we talking about ? Sparrow or Buzzard ?

If it's too big to cover up with touch-up paint or the chip got all the way through the paint to the metal, I'm fairly certain you're going to need to take it to a body shop for work.

What's your comp deductible ?

 

Bummer. Happy birthday, anyway.
Good luck with the fix.

 

the chip's length is probably about a quarter of the size of a single grain of rice. Anyway, I'm not sure if it got through the metal. All I know is that I could feel the tiny indentation when i run my finger over it. Oh yeah, and it is the color of bird crap (white). How accurate is the touch-up paint?

Yeah, also, how much would body shop work normally cost with no insurance. I'm saying that because I just do not know what my comp deductible is off the top of my head....

 

That's a tiny chip... and if you can see white, sounds like it didn't go all the way through to the bare metal. That's probably a primer coat or rustproofing coat (the stuff cars get dipped in prior to being painted).

Anyway, if the paint around the chip isn't raised up do to the impact, you can touch it up and it'll be nearly invisible. Of course, you have to order the right touch up paint. Somewhere on the board, you can find a thread with a link to order the paint.

If you took that to a body shop, I doubt they'd charge you more than about $75 to fix it. Anyone else have experience with having a similar chip repaired ?

 

You could probably fix that OK with touch-up paint ($18). I also got a kit from Langka which helps avoid "the blob". http://www.langka.com/complete-paint...-kit-p-30.html

I was pretty satisfied with the results. Something to remember - this will not be your last chip.

 

sweeet! I think I'm going with the Langka and the touch-up paint. Thanks guys!

 

make sure that langka has something metalic for your DS. with the metalic paints it can be hard to match the mettalic speckles.

 

Rule #1 in using touch-up paint .. Shake the bottle 'till your hand gets tired then shake it some more.

 

See http://autorepair.about.com/od/produ...afpr081105.htm

 

With barely 800 miles on my MINI, I already have a little paint chip on the hood. I am going to buy some MINI paint and touch it up carefully. If you don't want to do this yourself, you can always have a reputable body shop do it for you.

Chipped paint is a fact of life unless you live in a city/state with extremely well maintained roads. I don't know of a place like that.

 

On the WHAT ??!!??!!

 

The Hood. That's the battleship that was sunk by the Bismarck in WWII.

 

The answer to a paint chip on the door is a side graphic decal.

http://www.aestheticreations.net/galleryframeset.htm

You would probably have to fill it with touch-up paint and buff it smooth, but if it still didn't look right...

 

I drive on 280 everyday and the windshield on my current car has a crack, hopefully it will not happen to my new mini.

 

Otherwise known as the "bonnet"

 

A bonnet is a stupid looking hat, a la Little Red Riding Hood. And another thing, they are diapers, not nappies. And, although I would like to get knocked up a little later in the day, I will not walk around outside with my pecker up!

 

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh... THAT's what he meant. Yes, now I remember that word, "hood". That's what an *ordinary* car has on the front end.

 

MC2 had an article this month about the paint process on MINIs. Starting in 2006, they evolved to a base-primer, which means the primer and the base are the same coat. Not sure if there is anything under that base-primer, but the article implied that coat is sprayed on bare metal after degreasing. I've got some very small chips too (almost 3000 miles already) and on Mellow Yellow, it does appear to look like white under color. After 3 tries, I never managed to get local paint shop to pull off an exact match on color. I'd definitely recommend buying touchup from MINI.

 

I have a tiny chip on my Bonnet so I went into the MINI dealer to get some Laser Blue touch-up paint. The guy behind the counter said it was back-ordered and wouldn't be available for a couple of months. I asked him for a suggestion on where to get the paint and he said that the detail dept. could fix it for $50. I said that was way too expensive for a tiny chip I could cover in one dap with touch-up. He said that the the touch-up paint was $33 for a bottle the size of a nail polish bottle. I guess I'll got to Pep Boys and try to find a match. As I recall the touch-ups from auto parts stores are around $7-8.

 

http://www.paintscratch.com/

 

With all the rock chips in my paint and windshield and door dings I'm going to call my MCS Chippy McDent .I,ll just flow with it and consider each new nick a mod .

 

You might have the right attitude about this sort of thing.
My first "mod" happened when my windshield got chipped by a large rock on the 880 in the south east bay. I've called several window repair shops and they all quote a price around $50. I think things are much more expensive in CA than the rest of the country because some have posted that type of repair should only be about $20. Man, the price we pay for good weather.

 

I believe most insurance companies will pay for windshield rock chip repairs once or twice a year and it won't affect your rates. Here in Oregon we have places that advertise free rock chip repairs, what they do is take the insurance information and bill them instead of you. It wouldn't hurt to ask your insurance company what their policy is.

 

While it's a great suggestion, I usually don't bother with insurance unless there's a catastrophic need. My father worked for an insurance company and I know that several little claims are sometimes enough for a company to not renew.