I have chipping in my original thermoplastic paint. The rest of the car is in gorgeous condition due to its being a single owner who kept it in a garage and babied it. Besides a repaint(which I am not going to do on original paint this nice) how are chips repaired in thermoplastic?

 

Lower left part of the pic looks like it's been repaired before? If so, I'd just have it spot repaired by a competent body shop and fix that lower part at the same time. If not, and you wanted it really nice, a competent paint correction shop could do it. DIY? A can of touchup paint, tiny paint brush or smashed toothpicks, make dots and let cure and carefully wet sand and polish.

 

It’s the angle of the photo. No repairs have been made to it. This car came with every single receipt for every little thing that’s ever been done to it. Only repair body wise was some surface rust repair around the rear window in the 90s. I am a competent body and paint guy but thermoplastic paint as I understand does not play well with other paints. I’d rather have chips than a shoddy looking repair job. I don’t want to strip the whole panel and repaint since the entire car is original.

 

Acrylic Enamel plays well with the thermoplastic paint. This is a picture of my car painted with Acrylic Enamel 7 years ago. I had to remove all of the thermoplastic paint from the top,bonnet and trunk lid because of pin holes going through the thermoplastic paint down to metal. The rest of the car was sanded, sealed with epoxy primer and repainted

 

What I've done on my car, which has Real paint from 1986, Carbon Black and not the dark gray water based garbage one must settle for in California these days, I found a selection of "Black" nail colors, different brands, and tried them on places not noticeable until I found one that matched pretty well.

My car was YELLOW before it was black, so you can imagine what paint chips looked like, of which there were Many! The repairs are slightly visible when the light is just right but it looks so much better than when I got the car!!

The thing is, if your car is a Driver, STUFF HAPPENS TO DRIVERS!! Drivers are Never perfect! All we can do is keep them Pretty Darn Good!

If you're not in a hurry about this, and it sound like it's been this way for a while, wander past several nail color displays (take your wife, she might have better color matching genes) and just pick up a hand full of what looks close. Then find a selection of fine brushes at a craft shop and experiment somewhere that doesn't show.

When you're finished, the scratches might still show, certainly You'll see them, but not one in 100 others will even notice unless they're Super Picky.
(';')

 

this is the information I was looking for. I will be sanding the chips so they are even and filling them in. Then sanding them so they are flat and polishing them. Single stage Acrylic enamel sounds like the winner!