Camry door frame weatherstrips

Your clearcoat will probably last ten years or so even if you park in the sun. It will start hazing a couple of years before it starts flaking off, usually. Keep the car clean and waxed and you may delay the deterioration somewhat. Or just trade the thing in every 4-5 years and let somebody else take the hickey.

You CAN put a car cover on the auto every time you park it, but that is a pain to do. If I had a classic Ferrari, I would be a lot more careful than if I drove a Hyundai.

Reply to
HLS
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I like the idea of treating the weatherstripping but greasy interior plastics lack appeal for me. The good news is that cars these days don't seem to suffer from cracked dashboards like the ones I had in the seventies and eighties. Every VW and Fiat I've ever owned had this problem. That was some ugly stuff.

Reply to
dsi1

I think that in those days the plasticizers were not as well developed for the polymeric parts as they are today. The dialkylphthalates would literally cook out of the plastics, and you would find the windshield smoky with that stuff.. Heaven only knows what it did to our health.

Some of the cars made in the Eastern Bloc had steering wheels that would often shatter in your hands at winter temperatures. (Some of these strikingly resembles Fiats, by the way ;>)

The company I worked for had a business unit that made boats out of polyethylene. We went through some of the same teething problems. The dyes faded, the plastic degraded, etc. But those items became very much improved as better technology was developed.

So I think the quality of some plastic items is generally better today than in the past. So much plastic is used that some of the parts inevitably fail, upsetting curmudgeons like me. (and those parts are not cheap to buy, just cheap to make).

Reply to
HLS

It caused males to develop female secondary sex characteristics, because many of the standard pthalate compounds used as vinyl plasticizers tended to act like estrogens in the body. Very weird.

They should have just stuck with nice reliable wood steering wheels like the British did.

--scott

Reply to
Scott Dorsey

My guess is that the stuff reacted badly to UV as most plastics will. OTOH, I used to have a piano that had plastic (styrene?) connectors that someone told me, would continue to cure and harden and become brittle and spontaneously shatter. I had a baggie of the pieces and replace them as they broke - all 88 keys.

Probably Fiat 128 clones - they're just like the real thing except not as high quality. :-)

You're right I think but there's probably not a lot of plastics that could stand up to long exposure to the sun. That would be great - plastic unaffected by UV.

Reply to
dsi1

There are no market valued plastics that I know of that can withstand long exposure to UV and heat. You can go to special polymers and they will do a lot better than the crap that is commonly used.

We used to make, sell, and analyze a "plastic" that is used in the heat shield resins for spacecraft. To make some analyses, we had to saw off a chunk, put it in a muffle furnace at a couple thousand degrees in a stream of OXYGEN (not air) for a couple of days until it was totally oxidized.

In science, a lot of things are possible if you are willing to pay the price.

Reply to
HLS

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