Bicycle Paint Repair; The (Best) Easy Way to Fix Chipped Paint

Early last spring during a spring cleaning round, my wife came out of the garage in tears. She was trying to lift a folding table over my prized Trek 5200 and accidentally scratched the paint on the top tube. It was down to the paint layer, through four coats of clearcoat, but not down to the primer.

We had just begun fixing our marriage and she was distraught that something this big might throw our whole marriage recovery into a tailspin. With the old me, I would have given her reason to worry. With the new me, it wasn’t even going to be a blip. In fact, I looked at it that my wife’s being as visibly distraught as she was as a sign we were making immense progress. That epiphany alone made having my frame scratched up worth it.

In fact, I considered leaving it as it was as a reminder of where we’d been and how far we’d come. Besides, the easy way to fix a chip or a scratch is with nail polish, but that’s not exactly the prettiest best way to fix a chip or scratch. Put simply, it fills ugly. The best way to fix a scratch or a chip is to airbrush the color and clearcoat over the scratch/chip after its been sanded down. I don’t have the equipment or patience for that. My wife, however, asked me about fixing it months later, so we started looking into nail polish. The old black polish I’d used on the frame had mysteriously grown legs and walked away… likely to the room of one of my daughters, but who knows, I could just have easily misplaced it. We’ll never know at this point, because my wife did me one better while we were out roaming Meijer (it’s a massive grocery/everything you need for daily life warehouse). She suggested this:

I didn’t know it at the time but my wife was a genius. The scratches were located on the exact top of the top tube, so when I laid the gel nail polish over the scratches, gravity pulled the polish into the scratches and the nature of the gel formula made it so the scratches filled much better than I would have expected. In fact, unless you really know what you’re looking for, you won’t find the scratches without an up-close visual inspection.

So, that’s my new trick, folks. Nail polish is, without question, the easiest way to cover up a chip or scratch in the paint. If you really want to cover the imperfection the best you can without pulling out an airbrush, try a “gel-like” polish and get that blemish facing “up” so gravity will help you fill the area without leaving ugly edges.

If you look at the fine print above, it’s a “gel like” polish. Apparently certain gel polishes require a UV light to harden – my wife says these are referred to a shellacs. Being the male of the species, I don’t know a thing about nail polish, but some quick Google searches produced the results that there are “gel” polishes that require setting with a UV light to set. Also, shellacs are, according to Cosmopolitan Magazine, the mix of regular polishes and gels and still require UV light. So, the “gel-like” polish is a regular polish, without the hassle of needing a UV light to set it. And now I know way too much about nail polish.

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