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!