Light guys so I got into a fender bender this morning. I lightly rear ended a big rig. He took off cuz he didn't know anything happened. I however have minimal damage. My driver headlight lens shattered and that's it.

Now I've got some price estimated from carid.com. They sound reasonable. But, this got me thinking I should just touch up the paint on my car too. It has a few scratches down through the paint.

My questions are how should I approach repairing the paint. Should I do it myself? And if so, I have no experience in this so do y'all have any advice or tips?

 

It would be helpful to post pictures of the damage.

You should get an estimate from a body shop first. They're usually free. Also, you don't know if anything behind the headlight got damage, or any fender damaged or bent, etc. Your hood and fender could be misaligned, or you could have plastic brackets that are broken from the headlight (which has to be replaced anyways.)

Post some pictures of the damage, and maybe take a trip to the body shop and see how much it costs. Having to replace a headlight with an OEM one is going to be over $1000 including labor, so you may want to go through insurance, depending on the cost of the repair.

You can try to find these parts from a junkyard cheap.

If you have light scratches and you want to repair them, it is better to have it professionally done by a paintless dent removal professional, which may be cheaper than having a body shop repaint it. Touchup paint never matches perfectly and it will look ugly especially on a car this old where the paint has faded.

If you hit a semi with enough force to crack a headlight there is likely to have more underlying damage.