If the chip or scratch has already begun to rust, lightly sand the area, and apply a thin coat of primer to any bare metal before painting.

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While most brass pens are heavily lacquered to preserve their lustre, the Hatch is finished with just a thin coat intended to wear away quickly, leaving the hygienic surface exposed.

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For instance, electroplating can be used to coat a thin layer of gold on to a cheap piece of material.

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It involves a thin Asian man in a shabby coat, standing by a gate in the snow of eastern Russia, wearing sneakers with no laces or socks.

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The other established approach is to take two wafers of silicon, coat each with a thin layer of glass on one side (which is done by baking them in oxygen), and then fuse them together to produce a silicon-glass-silicon sandwich.

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To preserve them for more than a billion years to make fossils out of ephemera a site first has to coat its remains in a fixative: a thin layer of waterproof sediment that will slowly harden into stone.

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Starting with two silicon wafers, Soitec machines coat the surface of one with silicon dioxide insulator and embed inside it a thin fault line of hydrogen atoms anywhere from 100 to 20, 000 nanometers below the surface, depending on customers' desired wafer thickness.

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