Road rash and rust, in the arid west?
My search for a new van continues. Yes, every used vehicle has SOMETHING wrong with it :). The current candidate seems great -- but it has a LOT of road rash. I don't mind. It's a boondocking rig...
Forum Discussion
How much paint chips (and their rust) are worrisome depends somewhat on where you are. If you're going to be in areas where they salt the roads in winter, the rust will, ummm, get rusty a lot more quickly than in the southwest deserts.
Lots of chips, I'd probably sand down and repaint. Few chips, sand them out and touch-up and repaint, filling if deep. For small pocks, I've had better luck with JB-Weld as a body filler than Bondo or similar, mainly because it's closer to the hardness of the metal and hence easier to sand somewhat smooth. It's also slightly less messy to work with.
The alternative view is to just kind of keep an eye on it and see how things develop and only worry about it if it's obvious that something needs to be done. It should not be too hard to find junkyard body panels for a van, if worse comes to worse, since there are many of the exact same ones on the road--assuming this isn't some esoteric van that nobody has heard of. Good Sprinter body panels may be harder to come by than some others because they seemed to like to rust out relatively quickly, at least the earlier ones.
Lots of chips, I'd probably sand down and repaint. Few chips, sand them out and touch-up and repaint, filling if deep. For small pocks, I've had better luck with JB-Weld as a body filler than Bondo or similar, mainly because it's closer to the hardness of the metal and hence easier to sand somewhat smooth. It's also slightly less messy to work with.
The alternative view is to just kind of keep an eye on it and see how things develop and only worry about it if it's obvious that something needs to be done. It should not be too hard to find junkyard body panels for a van, if worse comes to worse, since there are many of the exact same ones on the road--assuming this isn't some esoteric van that nobody has heard of. Good Sprinter body panels may be harder to come by than some others because they seemed to like to rust out relatively quickly, at least the earlier ones.
