How to Clean Tiny Rust Spots on Car

Tiny rust spots on car - Image

A few parts and area of your car is constantly exposed to air. As you know, when bare metal is exposed to air, that might end up in tiny rust spots on the car body.

And cleaning these tiny rust spots on a car can be messy if you don’t know how to deal with it. If you’re stuck around this problem, we’ve brought up a set of steps to help you out.

Take a few minutes of a break from whatever you are doing for your car rust treatment and go through the entire article

Why these Tiny Rust Spots Create on Your Car?

As we’ve said before, bare metal is likely to a chemical reaction with the oxygen of the air. Parts like a car bumper, car body, etc. are exposed constantly to air. That causes oxidation on those metal spots, and that eventually leads to rust. However, go get away with the problem, all you need is a set of chemicals like grease and the proper way to proceed. Here are the steps:

Step 1: Identify the Spots

First thing first, you need to know and locate the areas where these rusts had taken place. There are two or three categories of such rust, where penetrating rust is the worst of them.

If you see the rust to create holes on the metal surface of the car body, it’s possible that it’s penetrating rust.

Taking that for granted, we’ve crafted the following steps to take surface rust and scale rust out.

Step 2: Wash the Affected Area

The rust-affected area needs to be washed at this stage. You may use car soap, water, and a mild sponge to scrub it off.

Remember that, if you are dealing with scale or surface rust on the car only, that it might work. However, mix the car soap with a bit of water, and rub it on the affected area.

Now, scrub the area with a sponge scrubber and make sure that the rust is coming out. The rust should be coming out as you keep scrubbing.

Once you are done, you need to rinse the whole area that you’ve worked on so far. Here are a few safety tips to get along with this step –

  • Make sure to protect yourself from metal flakes that come out with the rust.
  • Scrub in such a way that too much pressure doesn’t get on the car painting. Otherwise, car paint may get affected.

Step 3: Prepare the Area for Painting

As long as the rust is gone from the area, you need to repaint this area to make it look like the rest of the body.

Before doing that, you need to prepare the nearby area for that. You may try taping off the body panel, and any other area that you don’t want to be painted.

Also, you can try putting a painter’s tape before car repainting. What it’ll do, will take off the additional rust particles that are still there on the surface.

Also, It’ll bring on the adhesive residue as well. As you are done, tape off the areas like the wheels, the windshield, the glass, and so on.

Step 4: Learn the Color label of Your Car

To paint the car spot that we’ve worked on so far, you need to know the color code of your car. If the color is the same as you bought it, you may find the color code on the body.

If you still can’t find it, you can take help from the manufacturer’s website. Defining the model, you can check out the color code of it.

Step 5: Color The Space that We’ve Worked on So Far

At the last stage, you may need to buy primers, base paints any additional paints that you need to paint the spot. Make sure the automotive primer and paint match perfectly with the existing color code of your car. In the case of treating rust spots, rust cleaning spray can be sufficient enough to recover the spots.

But if the area is large in size, you may need to execute the painting in a professional way. The best advice in this place is to take it to a car workshop and get the area painted.

Most Relevant: How to Remove Scratches from Car Interior Plastic

How many types of Rust are there?

We’ve mentioned in step 1 that, there are three kinds of rusts that can develop on a car body. To give you a more broken down insight, here are the three types of them

  1. Surface Rust
    It’s the basic type of rusting, and the first development of rust on the car body takes place in this form. It usually creates scratches or nicks on the car painting. Also, it looks like a tiny and discrete reddish rust on the metal surface.
  2. Scale Rust
    Scale rust is the intermediate kind of rust that might develop on the car metal surface. If you allow the surface rust to spread for quite some time, that might turn into scale rust.
    Dealing with scale rust can be quite hard if it’s across a wide area. As long as you identify it, you need to take action to take that off.
  3. Penetrating Rust
    The third, and the worst kind of rust can develop on a car body can be the penetrating rust. They are likely to create holes on the metal surface and cause permanent damage.
    If penetrating rust takes place on your car body, it’s best to take it under a mechanic’s operation and remove the affected metal permanently.

To get a complete idea about this topic here is a related video!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ireaL_otVeM

Bottom Line

Car rust is quite a regular fact for any car owner. If you’ve got mild rusty spots on any place of the car body, no need to worry about that too much.

Simple cleaning and rubbing in a proper way might do the magic. If the case is serious enough, it’s advisable to take the consultancy of a mechanic or a car professional.