so after spaying librarlly rustoleum equivalent on roughed up with wet and dry rust spots (it's been a month now, I;'m sure it's all cured now, besides, I washed the car once since then ;-) I plan to dump some manual transmission fluid into door crevices (don't want to pay for a bottle of ATF at this point but I have something like half a bottle of 75w90 lying around),
then do I need to find a paint shop that will do the proper job getting rid of rust, priming and painting the beater or there is an el cheapo road less traveled?
I wouldn't even bother painting any "holed" rust unless I painted it with POR-15 first. That seems to lock in the painted rust at least. But you'll still get more rust behind it, so it's just a stopgap to slow things down. Surface rust due to paint defects can just be sanded, primed, and finished, so that's trivial. I wouldn't bother with any oiling. Messy, and makes other cosmetic painting ineffective. The POR-15 is about 25 bucks for the small kit, and should be enough for any typical car rusting. I've used that on my last 2 cars when they got holed. Never bondoed the holes, just used it to slow the rust, and it did. Holed rocker panels has always been the main issue for me, here in saltland. But by that time, it's time to think about replacing the car anyway, since the newer ones generally have engineering improvements that make it practical. Found that true in my case anyway. My latest transitions to "new" cars has been '76, '88, '97, '03. All "large" to "mid" sized Chevy sedans. The last, from a '97 Lumina, to an '03 Impala, is probably the least improvement except in terms of gas consumption. In some areas, the Impala is lower quality than the Lumina. I really only see engineering improvement showing up in gas consumption. Maybe safety, don't know. But I have to wait until things go wrong to really know which car is better. I know where you're coming from, since I would have kept the Lumina forever with holed rockers, but the engine broke. If there was no rust I would have replaced the engine, but fighting the losing rust battle made me bite the bullet and update to a non-rusted car. A man's got to know his limitations.
well, so far the only (newly developed) problem with the drivetrain is that the beater started to pop out of the 4th gear. no such problem with 1-3 and the 5th.
the plan is to give it to my wife to learn how tio drive so I want it to last another 2-3 years if possible.
I've had that exact problem on an old FWD VW transmission. Bad output shaft seal caused the gear oil to leak out, trans would overheat and drop out of 5th. Fill it up, it'd work fine. Unfortunately it was found that the root cause was a bad bearing, so swapping the whole trans for a junkyard unit was cheaper than repair (really easy on that car)
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