Chips Away/Starmist

[CROUCHY]

Hi,
I have a '94 Chimaera, starmist green.
I've seen a a few posts here about "Chips Away".
Am I right in thinking that the service makes sense for larger scrapes but not the usual constellation of chips on the nose of the car?
Also, anybody had good/bad experiences in SE London with the local franchise?
Cheers,
Crouchy

[julianhj]

I use them weekly as part of my business (car hire). The quality of work depends on the franchisee - I've known some lose their franchise for repeated bad jobs. Thet can usually do anything from small chips to sizable scrapes. A good franchisee will be honest if he thinks the job is beyond his skills. With certain paint finishes you'll never get better than a 90% match - a full respray is the only answer for 100% quality. give your local guy a call, he may be happy to come out and give a free estimate. There are plenty of different companies doing smart repairs these days, it might pay to shop around. Might also be worth talking to local bodyshops to see if they'd be willing to undertake the work (as opposed to respraying the panel).

[TUS 373]

If I may add a question. My TVR has a scratch on the wing but it is confined to the lacquer coat only. Most of the time it does not bother me but it would be nice to get the car back to A1 condition as there are no other marks on it.

From previous experience with another TVR with a similar problem, I am hesitant to trust anyone to touch it. A main dealer polished out a lacquer scratch only to make it more noticeabe than ever due to the colour difference of exposing paint after polishing off the lacquer. It gave a patchy appearance.

Could Chips Away fill in a lacquer scratch with more lacquer and then polish off the excess to make it look as good as new?

[grey42cerbie]

I've just had Chips away look at a spot of lacuer damage on mine. He didn't want to do it cos it was in the middle of a fairly flat panel. He then quoted £190 to fix it saying that he'd have to do the whole panel, glup! I was expecting £30 ish. He did the quote for free though. It's worth getting someone to have a look.

Cheers, Steve
Grey 4.2 Cerbie

[RichardR]

I had Chips Away come and give me a quote and, apparently, any job will start at £125 +VAT as that's their basic fee. However, for that they would have done all the stone chips on the bonnet and mirrors.

[cutmonster]

Have used them, was bitten. Now very shy. E-mail me off-line for F&BP. That's "Further and Better Particulars" for non-lawyers ;-)