Stabilizing surface rust spots

JHZR2

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My 91 300d I bought with a strange paint failure on the trunk. It’s a fairly constrained area, wondering if maybe the car got hit with an egg or something.

There are a couple other scratches with surface rust too.

While I’ll probably end up painting the car, I want to sort it out and do other things first. Painting is a $2000+ job that can wait. But I do want to stabilize these spots.

Hoping that with white paint maybe I can blend it kind of/sort of? Though I’m not all that keen on removing lots of paint, as I assume that if I have different areas with different number of layers of paint, that it will affect the look of a repaint, or require a lot more prep (?).

Here are the spots:

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The bottom picture by the windshield seal worries me a bit because there’s a bit of a vein under the paint. These windshields are glued in AFAIK, not the old school press in/rope seal type.

Thoughts on best practices?

I’m looking to stabilize until the time comes that I repair/repaint the car. I anticipate that the car will see sun and rain, but I won’t be using it in salt conditions.
 
If you grind and scrub down the rust then apply something like Rust Kutter, you can convert what you see. Then hit it with rust converting primer and white paint. Not gonna be perfect but will help. If you want to neutralize it for cheap for the time being you could use CRC marine corrosion inhibitor, let that seal and then apply fluid film over it. Most "Rust converters" don't do the best job, but those products after lots of research do pretty good.
 
See if Trav might be willing to fix these spots along with the back bumper in the other thread. I'm sure it would look great afterwards.
 
One more to add here. Hoping @Trav might have some hints.


I had noticed that on each rear wheel well inner fender liner, one of the rubber inspection plugs had been removed. No idea why.

Looking in I can see that the opposite side looks fine…

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However it must have been this way for some time because the metal around the holes is a bit crunchy. I suspect that the OE holes lost whatever wax or rubber plug and moisture sat on bare metal abs wicked between the metal and the schutz they sprayed the wheel wells with.

This is the kind of job that when you start digging you may regret it. That said, I do currently have access to a parts car of the same vintage, locally, in somebody’s back yard, that I could probably cut some metal from if I chose (even if it was a nasty job with a sawzall type blade….).

I am not sure there’s anything wrong with closing these holes up permanently,

Thoughts?

Heres a pic I took of the parts car because I was going to take rubber plugs to fit my car… but I need to fix mine first, even if that means cutting them in.



F60D828A-5AC2-4AB4-B7BA-46876D8712B1.jpeg
 
Once you start, the repair area can be twice as large as what you see. I see a lot of cracks in the paint around the area, hard part will be, once you start sanding it off , where do you stop ?
 
Once you start, the repair area can be twice as large as what you see. I see a lot of cracks in the paint around the area, hard part will be, once you start sanding it off , where do you stop ?
Agree. What I know on the trunk lid is that there is a white diesel in a yard not far, so I can always fall back on buying and installing that.

But plan a would be to use some aggressive disc to remove as much as I can to bright metal, then feather, prime the bright metal, and paint. Ultimately I may consider painting the whole car, the key right now is to stabilize these spots so they don’t go from weird surface rust spots to more significant perforation type damage. None of them are remotely close to that. I think that if I attack the spots and fill any pits with a glazing putty, then a feathered spray can make for a reasonable 10 ft paint job…
 
The US Navy tested corrosion converters/inhibitors and found Corroseal is the best product.
 
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