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Not that much rust on the body itself.
However ....
the underside had been (convincingly but badly) undercoated when I bought this in 2018.
You’ll be able to tell.
Now that it’s peeling off and showing the true truck underneath, is there much I can do for this otherwise stellar 2005 X, EB 6.8 V10? About 140K miles.
Replacing some of the rusty parts will help but do I need to worry about the frame? Or anything else you can see? My mechanic said that despite the rust, the frame was otherwise still strong.
Should I replace the trailer hitch? And is that some sort of snow plow attachment on the front (or is it something else?)
Thanks in advance.
If it were mine, I'd be getting whatever that undercoating/paint is off of everything, treating it all with ospho and painting it with a quality undercarriage paint. It's a lot of wire wheeling under there and taking stuff apart and getting it all cleaned up. Or, you could let it go and be done with it. Frame isn't likely to be bad and the trailer hitch you'd have to get in there with a wire wheel and clean it all up to tell. If there are any holes in the hitch, replace it fro sure. And understand you might not see the holes until you take it (or the rear bumper) off.
It's a project, but worth it in the end in my view. Appears that the brackets on the front could be from a plow, which means they probably plowed snow with it and got it all salty. In fact, the areas where the paint is peeling, it looks a lot like salt does when it dries and starts to eat. You get that circular/round pattern from the salt.
I want to stop the rust dead in its tracks and get it to the point where I can see as little of the rust as possible.
What kind of places do the sort of work that EXSwap mentioned and about how much could I expect to pay
for the entire underside of this monstrous vehicle to be finished (painted, newish-looking and all) as you've described?
I'll take some better pictures of the trailer hitch but the inside of it was this picture here (not the best photography I shall admit):
Originally Posted by EXSwap
I mean, it doesn't look terrible....yet.
If it were mine, I'd be getting whatever that undercoating/paint is off of everything, treating it all with ospho and painting it with a quality undercarriage paint. It's a lot of wire wheeling under there and taking stuff apart and getting it all cleaned up. Or, you could let it go and be done with it. Frame isn't likely to be bad and the trailer hitch you'd have to get in there with a wire wheel and clean it all up to tell. If there are any holes in the hitch, replace it fro sure. And understand you might not see the holes until you take it (or the rear bumper) off.
It's a project, but worth it in the end in my view. Appears that the brackets on the front could be from a plow, which means they probably plowed snow with it and got it all salty. In fact, the areas where the paint is peeling, it looks a lot like salt does when it dries and starts to eat. You get that circular/round pattern from the salt.
I imagine that having that work done at a shop would be fairly expensive. I wouldn't know how much, but you're looking at likely a full sandblast and paint. Really the only good way and likely more efficient in the long run would be to pull the body and do the body and frame separately.
Rust? What rust? I don't see any rust there. Drive it up north a bit and sell it for a fortune as rust-free!
There's no magic bullet, really. Any inside areas that you can't really get to can be coated with something like Eastwood's Internal Frame Coating. You'd want to knock as much loose stuff out as you can and either blow it or vacuum it out, and then you run this tube down the interior area through whatever hole you can find. That tube has a nozzle that sprays in an almost 360 degree pattern and it puts a coating on that will encapsulate any existing rust and prevent new rust from forming.
For the stuff you can get to, knock it clear with a wire brush or portable sandblaster and then hit it with some POR15. It can be a little challenging to use that stuff upside-down, but your patience will be rewarded. Once that's done, hit it with a rubberized undercoating (POR makes one, but you can check compatibility with any of the others that are out there). If you can get it up on a lift, you'll have a much easier time of it, of course, but it can be done with a regular creeper and some really good eye protection. Use a respirator and don't get it on your hootus.
There are other rust encapsulators out there that you can use and you can also use a rust converter. I'm not sure that you've got enough rust for a converter to work, though. What you're really going to have a hard time with, I think, will be the fasteners. There's not a lot you can do about them as they sit in place, but if you ever have to work on anything where those have to come out, consider lots of penetrating oil and/or heat and be prepared to have broken fasteners or ones that will need to be cut out. Once you've got them off, you can soak them in oxylic acid for a while to dissolve the rust and then once they're re-tightened, spray it with some fluid film or other similar product.
As mentioned above, if you wanted to do it the "right way", it would probably involve lifting the body off, pulling out the drivetrain and everything else attached to the frame and then sandblasting it and recoating it with an epoxy paint or powdercoating it.
Is that a long line of rust-through at the seam of your muffler or just an artifact of the flash from the photo?
You need to remove the loose coating and loose rust before applying a rust encapsulator. The best is sand blasting. Scraping, sanding, and wire brushing are OK though. I'd use Eastwood Platinum Rust Encapsulator, KBS Rust Seal, or the other one I can't think of right now. Spray Eastwood internal frame coating inside cavities. You need to do this now. By next year it will really be bad.
Wouldn't an encapsulator just seal in the moisture and allow this to be eaten away unseen?
At least, that's what I heard Scotty Kilmer say once.
Im not sure, depending on what product you go with there is an actuall chemical conversion that happens that changes changes chemical composition of the rust. As other have said it isn't bad now but left untreated will be bad quickly. Get that old rust flakes and what looks like undercoating. Sandblasting is best but a wire wheel and some elbow grease will work adequatly for most of that. Yours does not look too bad so dealing with it now will go along ways. Here is what my rear axle looked like that had been undercoated and never touched up once moisture was allowed to get under it.
WD40 is pretty short lived, so you'll be spraying it often. That's why I suggested a stickier petroleum product, so it hangs on there longer, keeping the metal from oxidizing.
WD40 ingredients NAPHTHA (PETROLEUM), 67% HYDRO-TREATED HEAVY MINERAL OIL 21% CARBON DIOXIDE 2-3% NON HAZARDOUS INGREDIENT like Hexane and benzene 9% to 10%
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