Modern car paint and rust

Most underhood fasteners I've seen are conversion coated with zinc or some other phosphate. The bolts on my Hyundai have a black coating on top of some kind of zinc. After 12 years it's gotten pretty fluffy and looks like electrogalvanizing.

The Ford bolts look uncoated.

Can you immagine being the service manager having to explain that to half of the paranoid customers at a dealership? They'd be "calling you anything but a white man", convinced you were lying to them, just trying to put off repairs untill THEY had to pay because it was off warranty? THAT is why they invented the "idiot guage"

I went through that as a Toyota service manager many times. On a hot day the customer would come in complaining the OP guage was reading half a needle width lower - or after changing the oil - Or they'd come in complaing the oil pressure was too high and they were told by some backyard mechanic friend that it would cause the oil to get too hot, and waste gas - - -

in the 1990s, this changed - and quite suddenly. Does anyone know what spec ific changes were made to the paint composition and surface treatment? I ca n only find vague allusions in most articles.

ular Mechanics auto advice column. A guy wrote in with a concern about his oil pressure reading in his new Ford F-150. He said he had noticed when it was started cold, the oil pressure always came up to the exact same level and never decreased once the engine got warm, as his previous pickup had do ne. The pressure always remained at the exact same place no matter engine t emperature or RPM. The auto advice guy at PM said on his year/model of pick up, Ford had replaced the pressure transmitter with a pressure switch with a fixed resistance. When the switch closed, it would always deflect the oil pressure needle to the same location. In other words, an idiot light. As f ar as I've seen, no other auto manufacturer ever pulled one like that. Save d them what? $1.50 a truck? So, here you are doing 70 on the interstate all day and one or more cam bearings are starting to go. From personal experie nce, that's always a

your P.O.S. Ford pickup drops to zero and the backup idiot light comes on, the engine has been operating way too long on insufficient oil pressure and is likely already trashed. A guy I worked with had a new Ford pickup. I re ad him the column and he said,"That's just the way my truck acts!". Now I d on't know if they still practice this world class chicken^&*(, but I've had my last Ford.

So, you're saying GM, Chrysler and the rest are doing this? Do you remember where you read this information?

WHAT? It wasn't that way in my old '90 F-150 5L. Nor is it in my '07 Tundra 4.7L. They lowered at idle and raised at high RPM, and varied with the engine temp, as they should.

That's unconscionable, as well as downright rude of Ford if it's true. But the local Ford dealer wanted over $40k for the same half ton pickemup truck that Toyota wanted $26k for. That was back when Ford was having quality problems and was thinking about offshoring more of its vehicles to Mexico. My old '90 was Hecho in Canuckistan. (Windsor, ON CA IIRC.) I'm happy I made the change to the better manufacturer, as I've been quite happy with the new truck for a decade.

Plain zinc, y'mean?

So install a temporary dial gauge and mark the dash gauge with a diamond scribe and felt-tip?

SS loves to gall and seize, and it can be worse with same grade nut and bolt, so use a good anti-seize. A $7 bottle of Permatex al/cu/graphite from Amazon (8oz) will last you for decades. I like putting a dollop of it on an old wool sock (laundered, of course) and fold/squeeze it to distribute. Then take your bolt, fold the sock over the threaded portion and rotate 270 degrees, coating every thread to the root very quickly. Coats dozens before regooping. Store the sock in a ziplock bag for later use, keeping it with the A/S.

At 5 minutes per entire project, it's a lot less time consuming than drilling out and tapping one single broken bolt. DAMHIKT.

spray everything with oil twice a year is my choice

That method is likely quite ecologically disastrous, Ig. Perhaps not as bad as cad, but using something which does not wash off would be better.

Don't have to read it. I was a mechanic for many years. They've been doing it for years. I've worked on a lot of vehicles with the "idiot guage" including my last Chryslers and my 1885 Pontiac Trans Sport

3.8. Most of them can't even be converted to a full guage by replacing the sensor because they do NOT have a resistor in the circuit. The meter is designed to go half scale when the sensor is grounded.

Good trick.

Electronic dash boards are always suspect. There are small computing elements everywhere nowadays. I notice mine reads once a while. And at startup to begin with. If cold - low gas, low oil, low battery. After the engine warms up or I drive a half mile or a full one the meters re-measure and there I go. Not all that bad. Not low on anything.

So it is often the first reading that fakes one out - taking it at an odd time.

Mart> On Sunday, February 12, 2017 at 1:43:44 PM UTC-5, Christopher Tidy wrote: >> Hi folks,

and quite suddenly. Does anyone know what specific changes were made to the paint composition and

surface treatment? I can only find vague allusions in most articles.

auto advice column. A guy wrote in with a concern about his oil pressure reading in his new Ford F-150.

He said he had noticed when it was started cold, the oil pressure always came up to the exact same level

and never decreased once the engine got warm, as his previous pickup had done. The pressure always remained

at the exact same place no matter engine temperature or RPM. The auto advice guy at PM said on his year/model

of pickup, Ford had replaced the pressure transmitter with a pressure switch with a fixed resistance.

When the switch closed, it would always deflect the oil pressure needle to the same location.

In other words, an idiot light. As far as I've seen, no other auto manufacturer ever pulled one like that.

Saved them what? $1.50 a truck? So, here you are doing 70 on the interstate all day and one or more cam bearings

are starting to go. From personal experience, that's always a gradual decrease of oil pressure. By the time the

oil pressure gauge on your P.O.S. Ford pickup drops to zero and the backup idiot light comes on, the engine has

been operating way too long on insufficient oil pressure and is likely already trashed. A guy I worked with had

a new Ford pickup. I read him the column and he said,"That's just the way my truck acts!". Now I don't know

if they still practice this world class chicken^&*(, but I've had my last Ford.

>

How about lanolin based underoil spray? Or vegi based. I prefer the lanolin - like Fluid Film, or NHoilundercoating, A friend operated an undercoating business for years, and he mixed lanolin and paraffin hot, and sprayed it on underbodies. Quite a few "proprietary" dripless underoil products have lanolin and no petroleum products.

I'll accept it if you saw it that much. Ford was the only one I'd known abo ut. I was an airline mechanic. We sure had nothing like that. Just my .02, but it seems like deceiving a buyer to sell him a car with an oil pressure gauge that is nothing but an idiot light.

Hopefully the pilots aren't as "brain dead" as a lot of car owners/drivers. The ones I had the most trouble with were bloody engineers and hoity-toity "connoisseurs" who fancied themselves automotive experts just because they could afford to buy whatever crossed their fancy at the time. "MY porsche never had that kind of pressure fluctuation" (or insert Audi, Mercedes, Ferrari, or whatever) after buying a new Supra or whatever.

Four decades, specifically.

The can of Never-Seez I bought around 1975 finally ran low last year, though I still have plenty of LPS-100 for frame and bumper bolts. Spark plug threads given a single dab with the brush attached to the cap come out the next time completely covered, I don't need to mess up my fingers, tools and the plug insulator with a greasy rag. That end of the plug will see only a bit of the silicone from the wire boot.

Since it contains metal dust it isn't a good high voltage insulator. I just checked a 10mm long stripe of it on a paper towel with a 1 kilovolt megger. Well before I was cranking fast enough to reach 1000V it suddenly broke down and indicated about 2 megohms.

I do know about drilling broken bolts. One of the screws attaching the Ranger's defective ignition module to the intake manifold sheared off. The manifold is too big to clamp on my mill, so I machined a drill jig (guide) that indexed on the other screws and drilled the broken one cleanly enough to reuse the threads in the aluminum manifold.

-jsw

about. I was an airline mechanic. We sure had nothing like that. Just my .

02, but it seems like deceiving a buyer to sell him a car with an oil press ure gauge that is nothing but an idiot light.

Most of the pilots were good guys. But you always had that 10%. "The Cactus Crew". You know the difference between a cactus and a cockpit? A cactus ha s all the pricks on the outside.

Well, I was an airplane mechanic too and if I remember all the instruments has colored marks on them to tell the Engineer when the oil pressure (for example) got too low :-)

As for the guys in the front seats, they had a big loud warning bell, buzzer. siren, to tell the drivers when they slowed down too much :-)

Dis FREAKING gusting. That's what it is.

Yes, let's hope that pilots and airplane mfgrs are building (and reading properly) complete/calibrated gauge units and senders. It would be a shame to send the 10,000+RPM spinny parts into the cabin at speed and altitude, cutting the plane in half because a sending unit said it still had oil pressure when it didn't.