So I spent the whole day today on rust removal duty, I didn't think the rust was bad, but sometimes things can look minor until you open things up.
For those of you that live in perpetual summer no need to worry about this, your just a bunch of lucky bastards (argh), you can still enjoy your mint condition cars
, for those of us that put our cars through the harshness of winter this might be unsettling to read, but I thought some might want to catch any rust sooner than later, at least that is my thinking.
The worst spot in the strut towers, at first I noticed the tell tale signs which is a small amount of rust seeping in through the seams on the front inner portion of the strut towers, right in the corner. This pic will help, at this point in the picture I had already grinded away a lot of it with a die grinder and wire wheel, (sorry for my cell phone pics)
As you can see if goes up and all the way along the strut tower seam.
Now for underneath in the strut tower, you can see I had to remove the suspension to get to this.
This is the same passenger side tower, the left side of the pic is the outside of the tower
Again the same tower, but a pic of the front inner part of the tower. It seems that the slash shield doesn't go over enough to cover the seam which you can see in this pic, the water/salt goes up this seam and causes that rust inside the engine bay as you see in the first pic.
To get rid of this I ground out as much as I could with the wire wheel then used a phosphoric acid based rust remover to get the rest out. It didn't work very well with the acid, but did enough. Once dry I used Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator and then a spray on rubberized coating. I still have to seal the seams with seam sealer, but only part of the seam had to be pryed open to get at it. The rust amounted to surface rust that I could chip away, nothing too bad, but enough non the less.
Now to the rear of the car, lets try to explain this one, underneath the car right in front of the rear trailing arm pivot is where there was some more surface rust, seems there was barely any rubberized coating from the factory. Here is the passenger side again, the pic is after I ground the rust off, sorry, not great with the timing of pics.
There is one other spot that I don't have pics of since I did the work awhile ago, its in the rear wheel wells, in the outer rear section, again the rubberized coating wears off and leaves bare metal, it only had surface rust for me.
Thats it, those spots were the areas of concern for me. To me this was pure laziness on Mazda's part when assembling the car, seams could have been sealed better and more rubberized coating could have been applied. Perhaps they didn't take into account the harshness of certain winters.
Hope this helps
For those of you that live in perpetual summer no need to worry about this, your just a bunch of lucky bastards (argh), you can still enjoy your mint condition cars
, for those of us that put our cars through the harshness of winter this might be unsettling to read, but I thought some might want to catch any rust sooner than later, at least that is my thinking.The worst spot in the strut towers, at first I noticed the tell tale signs which is a small amount of rust seeping in through the seams on the front inner portion of the strut towers, right in the corner. This pic will help, at this point in the picture I had already grinded away a lot of it with a die grinder and wire wheel, (sorry for my cell phone pics)
As you can see if goes up and all the way along the strut tower seam.
Now for underneath in the strut tower, you can see I had to remove the suspension to get to this.
This is the same passenger side tower, the left side of the pic is the outside of the tower
Again the same tower, but a pic of the front inner part of the tower. It seems that the slash shield doesn't go over enough to cover the seam which you can see in this pic, the water/salt goes up this seam and causes that rust inside the engine bay as you see in the first pic.
To get rid of this I ground out as much as I could with the wire wheel then used a phosphoric acid based rust remover to get the rest out. It didn't work very well with the acid, but did enough. Once dry I used Eastwood's Rust Encapsulator and then a spray on rubberized coating. I still have to seal the seams with seam sealer, but only part of the seam had to be pryed open to get at it. The rust amounted to surface rust that I could chip away, nothing too bad, but enough non the less.
Now to the rear of the car, lets try to explain this one, underneath the car right in front of the rear trailing arm pivot is where there was some more surface rust, seems there was barely any rubberized coating from the factory. Here is the passenger side again, the pic is after I ground the rust off, sorry, not great with the timing of pics.
There is one other spot that I don't have pics of since I did the work awhile ago, its in the rear wheel wells, in the outer rear section, again the rubberized coating wears off and leaves bare metal, it only had surface rust for me.
Thats it, those spots were the areas of concern for me. To me this was pure laziness on Mazda's part when assembling the car, seams could have been sealed better and more rubberized coating could have been applied. Perhaps they didn't take into account the harshness of certain winters.
Hope this helps
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