Stone Chip Repairs Mobile across Manchester & the North West

Stone chips are caused by loose gravel, grit and road debris flicked up by the tyres of the vehicle in front of you. The faster the traffic, the harder the stone hits, which is why motorway and dual carriageway driving does far more damage than town miles.

Winter makes it worse. Gritters put down salt and sharp grit, and both get thrown around by every vehicle on the road. Water then works into the chip, freezes, expands and lifts the paint edges away from the metal. That is why a chip you noticed in October is often three times the size by March.

Certain parts of the car take nearly all of it, because they face forward and sit low.

• Leading edge of the bonnet and the top of the front wings
• Front bumper, grille surround and lower valance
• Wing mirror caps and A pillars
• Windscreen surround and the front edge of the roof
• Lower doors and sills, behind the front wheels
• Door edges and shuts, chipped in car parks rather than on the road

The chip is cleaned back to sound paint, filled and flatted level, then primed, colour matched and lacquered so the repair sits flush with the panel around it. The technician starts by degreasing the area and checking what the stone actually reached. A chip that has only broken the lacquer is a quick job. One that has exposed steel needs any rust removing first, or the repair will lift again within a year.

This is SMART repair, short for small to medium area repair technology. Instead of masking and respraying an entire bonnet, only the damaged area and a small blending zone around it are refinished. It takes hours rather than days, and it keeps the rest of your original factory paint on the car, which matters when you come to sell it.

Colour is mixed on site to your vehicle paint code, then blended outwards into the surrounding paint so there is no hard edge where old meets new. Lacquer goes over the top and is cured, and the blend edge is flatted and polished back to the same gloss as the rest of the panel. Done properly, you should not be able to find the chip afterwards.

• Clean, degrease and assess how deep the chip has gone
• Remove any corrosion and flaking paint from the edges
• Fill, flat and feather the chip level with the panel
• Prime, then apply basecoat mixed to your paint code
• Blend the colour out into the surrounding paint
• Lacquer, cure, then flat and polish the blend edge

Yes, most stone chip work is done mobile at your home or place of work. The van carries the paint mixing system, spray equipment and curing lamps, so the job is the same one you would get in the workshop. The technician needs somewhere off the public road to park, ideally a driveway, garage space or a quiet corner of a car park.

Weather is the one thing that stops us. Basecoat and lacquer will not cure properly in rain or in near freezing conditions, and a repair that has been sprayed in the wrong conditions will fail. We would rather move your booking by a day than hand back work we know will not last.

Bigger jobs come to the body shop at Unit C, The Yard, Rear of Constellation Mill, Radcliffe, M26 4AD. That includes bonnets that need a full panel blend, chips with rust that has spread under the paint, and anything where the car needs to sit somewhere dry and warm while it cures. We are open Monday to Friday from 09:00 to 20:00 and Saturday from 09:00 to 16:00.

When there are so many chips across a panel that individual repairs stop making sense. A bonnet peppered with a hundred chips after years of motorway commuting is better resprayed as a panel than treated chip by chip, and we will tell you that rather than quote for the long way round.

The other case is rust that has already spread. If the metal under the paint has blistered or perforated, that is bodywork rather than paint, and filling the chip on top of it just hides the problem for a season. And if the chips are on a sill behind a mud flap where nobody will ever see them, sealing them to keep water out is enough. Paying for a full blend on a panel you cannot see is money wasted.