Rust Never Sleeps

It starts with a benign-looking bubble and grows, like the malignancy it is, into a metallic carnivore with the potential to consume a Hummer and then go looking for dessert. It's rust, the bane of anything metal and one of the greatest challenges for auto restorers.

The Creep
No one is truly safe from rust. It first rears its bumpy head in regions with high rainfall and urban areas where salt is used on icy streets. But, even high humidity or beach communities in relatively arid Southern California feel the sting of rust.


To most vehicle owners, rust is annoying at best, and at worst it's a total automotive meltdown. For those hearty souls in the midst of restoring a classic that's suffering from long years of neglect, the bubble patch on the surface may be the symptom of terminal problems, like the proverbial tip of the boat-sinking iceberg.

No More Metal
The conventional approach to rust is to keep poking at it until you hit uncontaminated metal. In the most serious cases, that just doesn't happen. You scrape and sand and finally see the daylight through the metal. That's when it's time to turn to companies like Year One that specialize in providing replacement sheetmetal for body panels and floor pans. That's the extreme case, and we'll deal with installing panel replacements in a following article. For now, we're going to take a more optimistic approach: rust can be stopped, despite Neil Young's baleful song that "Rust Never Sleeps."


In any discussion of corrosion, it's important to understand exactly what it is, in scientific terms. The vehicle's steel is a combination of iron, metal impurities and negatively charged free electrons that are attracted to the iron atoms under normal conditions. All that changes when moisture is introduced—moisture in the form of actual water or simple humidity. Through electrolysis, the electrons abandon the iron and head straight for the metal impurities, forming rust.