How to Protect the Body from Rust

The natural enemy of cars, especially old cars, is “rust”, isn’t it? If you want to ride for decades to come, you have to protect the body from rust.

I often see that the license plate bolts are replaced with stainless steel so that they do not rust, but it is half correct and half incorrect.

Every bolt has a nut. The combination of stainless steel bolts and iron nuts causes dissimilar metal contact and attempts to promote the oxidation (rust) of the iron nuts. This is completely meaningless, so if you want to replace it with stainless steel, you have to use a bolt and nut set.

For example, in the case of Nissan Figaro, the nut side (stay on the back) of the license plate is made of iron and the nut is welded and cannot be replaced, so it is better to make the bolt made of iron. Bare iron bolts will rust quickly, so use plated bolts.

The introduction has become longer, but I will explain how to protect the body. Apply the dissimilar metal contact described earlier to mount the sacrificial electrode. Simply put, a metal that rusts more easily than iron is attached, and that metal is rusted to protect the iron (body).

The metal is here. It ’s a zinc ingot. I think you can buy it at an online shop for less than $ 10.

It would have been nice if there were bolts growing from the body, but I didn’t have that, so I made a hole in the trunk floor. Pass the bolt from above and peel off the paint where it comes in contact to expose the bullion.

And I installed it using “iron” bolts and nuts. There is no point in using stainless bolts and nuts here. This was actually done 2 years ago.

This is what the current zinc ingot looks like. As you can see from the photo 2 years ago, it looks whitish, isn’t it? Zinc is not red rust like iron, but white rust, so it is rusting more and more instead of the body.

You can see that the screw threads of the mounting bolts are not rusted at all. It’s a good place for metal to rust because it gets hot with the heat of the muffler, but you can see the effect of zinc ingot. After that, I just support the zinc ingot to protect the body in the future.