If You Do This, You’ll Never Have to Repair Rust on Your Car
rev up your engines,
today I'm going to talk about how to prevent rust on your car, now to prevent
rust, first you have to understand what rust is, rust is electrochemical
oxidation and in the case of cars, the steel, when it comes in contact with
oxygen in the atmosphere, water vapor atmosphere and other things like salt
that they put on the road and up north and winter, it starts an electrochemical
reaction that will eat up the steel in your car, it actually creates a weak type
of battery acid, that eats stuff up it's an electrochemical reaction, it uses
electricity and chemistry to eat up the metal, now cars of course are painted to
prevent the steel from getting its electrochemical reaction, now when my
grandfather was young, Model T Fords they used lacquer based stuff, they paint it and
buff it, and paint it and buffed it, to have layers and layers of paint that they buffed to
make it look good, but the basis of modern car painting is much different,
the metal has a primer type coat on it then it has base coat, which is the color,
then it has a clear coat to protect that all those layers protect the bare metal,
and as long as those layers of protections are still there, your car
won't rust, and when it comes to solid parts, the frame of the car and
crossmembers and stuff, these are generally electroplated when the vehicle
is built, the metal is a negative charge and the paint is the positive charge, and
when the body of the car goes into the tank, it coats it all with a zinc based
primer, now Zinc is used because it has to slow corrosion rate and it can be
used sacrificially, so instead of eating up your car, it can eat up some of the
zinc, and as you can see the process works, this is a 1994 Toyota Celica, look
there's no rust even on the wheel arches here, the process keeps it from rusting
and I know people are going to say, Scotty hey you live in Texas cars don't rust
there, well actually it's very humid here and if they start to rust, they rust
really bad and if you live on the beach they would, because it's saltwater, but my
mother still lives near Buffalo, the heart of the Rust Belt and her 20 year old
Toyota Corolla doesn't have any rust on it.
the just works.
As long as you keep the
coatings from being rubbed off or cracked off. or if you get in a wreck,
they're not resealed and as long as the process was done
correctly, for instance there were some 1990s Toyota Tacoma pickup trucks, that
they didn't coat the frames correctly and a lot of them rotted away and
Toyota had to replace a whole bunch of frames for free because of that, so you
have to realize, that this process of covering the steel is just a cover, it's not
like hot zinc galvanized, where you dip it when it's hot and hot melted zinc,
and then it becomes part of it, and if it gets scratched it doesn't matter, this
stuff if it gets scratched or knocked off, it will start to corrode inside, so
your whole thing is to keep the coating intact and here's how you do it, you're suppose to wax your car four times a year, once each season, that keeps the clear coat
supple, so that it won't crack and then water and stuff can get inside, I like
this Nufinish, technically it's not a wax, it's a polish but it does the same
thing, it protects the paint from cracking, because you have to realize,
it's metal it expands and contracts in the Sun, the paint has to expand and
contract too, if it gets all hard and dried out, it won't and then you'll see
all that kicked up paint where it's flaking off on your car, and here's a tip
if you ever do get a scratch on your car it's a good idea to just have a little
clear coat and some masking tape so if you do get a big scratch or a bump, you
can at least tape the area up and spray it with some clear coat and that will
seal it so it won't rust, granted to do a perfect job you'd have to sand it down
to the bare metal, then put some primer on, then put the base coat color on, and then put clear coat on, but at least putting a clear coat over anything that's been hit,
it's going to seal it in, as long as you do it fast enough before it starts
rusting, but let's say you got a real rust bucket that's already started rusting,
these rust preventative paints actually work quite well, I use this rust bullet
protective coating on the frame of my Celica, because the frame is on the bottom,
rocks hit it, all kinds of things hit it and when the paint on the bottom starts
chipping off, you want to seal it with something like this, so rust
doesn't start and eat up your frame especially for you guys living up north in
the Rust Belt hey all that salt water that comes on
when you put salt on the road and gets with the slush, that gets all
over it, of course you want to try to rinse it off whenever you can, but you
want to have the metal that it gets on sealed before anything else will happen,
I know a lot of guys up north before winter, they'll jack up their car or truck
they'll look under it and if they see that there's a bunch of rust starting, they'll
just surface rub a lot of it off, this can be applied on somewhat rusty metal and then
they can spray this on, roll it on anywhere you want, and then it'll protect
it for the winter, now you don't have to worry about salts on the roads and the
winter here in Houston, maybe once every 30 years when it does freeze, but hey I
know guys down in Galveston that live on the beach, and they use the stuff on
their frames, because they're driving around in a saltwater atmosphere right
on the Gulf of Mexico, and it keeps them from rotting away, because I've seen a
bunch of them that didn't, and they just rotted like mad, within five or six years,
because let's face it, big rocks and stuff generally aren't flying on the paint of
your car, but on the bottom of the car there's all kinds of stuff on the road
that's being thrown up and whacking against them, since these anti-rust
coatings can be sprayed on, you can put them in a spray gun, hey it's not a big
job, you don't care about the bottom of the car what it looks like, you don't
have to be a pro to actually paint the car to make it look shiny on the top,
this is the bottom, you don't care you just want the coating on there so it
won't rust, because ultimately the purpose of stopping rust is to prevent
electrochemical oxidation on the bare metal, as long as that metal has got a good
solid coating on it, it will not rust, so if you never want to miss another one
of my new car repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!