repairing a car scrape

A few weeks ago, my wife scraped the front of my car. The scrape is the full length of the front left corner, about 2 mm wide and 40 cm long. As far as I can see, there is no dent or any structural damage, just a scrape through the paint all the way down to the metal. As it is quite minor, I would rather not rush to get it fixed, and would rather leave it in case there is additional damage to the front as some point. But I am concerned about rust to the exposed metal. As it happens, I have some touchup paint given to me by the body shop a while ago following some other work I had done.

If I use this paint to manually touch up the scrape, do you think this will prevent any rusting over the next couple of years? And if I do this, would it cause any complications for the body work when I finally get it done?

Yes.

No, presuming you would have them sand it down thoroughly first anyway.

A 40cm (16 in) scratch is fixable via DIY, however, to make it look anything less than really crappy it will require a lot of work. Here’s the Wiki on automotive paint touch ups. The only thing the wiki omits is that you may need to repeat steps 7 and 8 a few times to get the painted area to blend. I actually use rubbing compound instead of 2000 grit sandpaper and polishing compound in place of 3000 grit, as I think the wet abrasive gives a better finish. Spend a weekend on the project and you won’t have to visit a body shop, and likely save $400+.

Thanks for the link.

Hmmm. It does sound like a lot of work, and my weekends are pretty precious. Perhaps it is worth the $400. But maybe I’ll try it first the lazy way and see how bad it looks. Worse comes to worse I will take it to the body shop the week after…