rust on underside of 05 excursion
 

My name is Tom. I just bought an 05 EB Excursion on Ebay. It had the score of 92 and pics looked great. Trouble is it is fom Plymouth, Massachuchetts and I guess theres a salt mine there. The truck is beautiful but the underside is ugly with rust. As you have guessed I am not too bright about such matters. I need advice. Bad. Please respond.

Clean it and paint it........simple.....I do it every spring .......especially around the wheel wheels

well, you can get under the truck with a hose and spray. flush out all the crevices in the under body, there are plenty. specifically, look under and behind the running boards and in the body gussets along the edge of the truck. also, the wheel wells and the area behind the rear tires and in front of the rear bumper. these areas collect a lot of sediment thrown up from the tires, and sediment holds water.

also the top and inside of the frame. flush the entire under body liberally with a heavy stream of water until the runoff runs clear.

then you can use compressed air to dry the areas that hold water and then apply some good chassis paint.

My truck has/had tons of under body rust. Bought the truck from a neighbor that while he never really drove it (28k miles when I bought it a year or so ago), he also took it to Vermont to ski and never rinsed off the under body to prevent the salt from going ape****. I hit the under body with a pressure washer and man did I get a lot of crap. Just got some of the POR stuff, some rust converter, scraped, cleaned, treated and coated everything I can reach. I'm still at it. It is time consuming but in my case, worth it.

Welcome to FTE !

As a start until you can do it right.... a lot of car washes have under body sprayers, do that a few times then research local shops that do undercoating....

I had that done on one of mine, but suggest you are there WATCHING them to ensure they don't short cut it and just spray over without cleaning....


Some paints nowdays actually bond and chemically change the rust...
might research that as well... but anal me would probably still want it cleaned off first :)

I don't think there's such thing as being too anal with out X's. I mean, most of us are the kind who like to hold on to our vehicles and take care of them, especially our X's. They're not made anymore and we want them to be around a long time and look/perform good doing it. Keep up the rust prevention man. That is called being proactive which is easier/better than being reactive and having a lot of costly work to do and replacing rusted parts too soon. Just my 2 cents worth fellas!!