living up north

[CAJUN 93]

ok, i know that the cold, ice, and snow are things to contend with, but the rust. oh the rust.

what brings this on is we have a guy traveling from new york to texas and develops a brake fluid leak. get the truck in here on the rack and the line from front to rear is leaking. every fitting and tube under the truck is rusted horribly. techs gonna end up replacing everthing cause anything he touches breaks or crumlbes. the frame has big flakes of rust on it. man its bad.

i've seen this before but this one's one of the worst. man how do techs make a living up there. a torch and bfh must be the primary tools in the box.

daryl

[burnt_servo]

how far north are you thinking of ?

up here it gets too cold to use salt on the roads , so stuff on the underside isn't that bad of shape , assuming it's taken care of .

what i've seen that rots the underside of a vehicle out faster than anything , is parking them ontop of lawn / grass for an extended period of time . the moisture from the ground seems to be worse than on gravel , or better yet parked ontop of a tarp .


btw i'm in northern british columbia , canada .

[cummins king]

man i know what you mean, if you think thats bad

i wanted to replace my front brake like, and i ended up replacing every brake line, because ever one i touched would break, i even broke one of the bleaders in the front of truck because it was so russted in there, and then try cralling under the truck you get all kinds of sthi in your eyes, isnt as bad as getting brake fluid in the eyes though, man did that hert

[MunK]

Having lived in Wisconsin most of my life I can attest, when you wrench on a vehicle driven year round up there....you use the torch a LOT.

I have seen 2004 Dodges with the bed sides rusted half off them already. I once bought a old ford that was so rusty the frame broke in half before I got it driven home. Or my favorite...the time my wife called me and let me know the battery fell out of the Chevy as she was leaving work. (1994 washed once a week)

NoRM

[PToombs]

Up here in central NY, if you need to do a rear brake line, plan on doing it from end to end, and the fuel lines too. Or vice versa. If you touch it, it's gonna leak!
Why do you think I'm doing a cab swap? I was lucky, my truck wasn't driven in the winter alot. It lasted 15 years before the floor went.

[TWorline]

On the plus side we do not use much Locktite around here!

[cummins king]

suprizingly enough my cab is in gooed shape, the worse parts are the two rear fenders the front driver side, and the big hole in the rear quarter in the box lol

[GO OVRIT]

The only time I ever had the state police call me about a safety inspection I did was because of rust. I rejected a girls car from NY that had brake lines I was affraid to touch. The girls dad thought I was trying to rip her off and called the state police.

[dieseljack]

I live in pa now they use a nice salt brine really gets in to those hard to reach places just lovely

[redneckroot]

I would rather have them just throw sand on the roads and drive slower then have a rotted truck. Brake lines are bad, but so are the bodies, wires, and every other thing that is related to metal on them. As far as wrenching on them goes there are shops around here that wont work on anything 7 years or older. The fenders on our tractor rotted off after being nice guys and slow blowing our neighbors driveway for one winter, the worst part is its only about 800 feet up the road.

[Richie O]

Old thread from the past but a good one. I had to replace every brake line on my 93, both rear wheel cyls and both front calipers due to the bleeders rusted as sharp as nails. All 3 e brake cables were frozen. The e brake hardware in the drums were froze solid. My cab was junk, the front inner fenders and front fenders were gone, The class 3 reciever hitch fell off when I hit it with a hammer, the rear spring hangers were paper thin and looked like swiss cheese. The frame had to be plated from the cab back. I bet I got a 5 gallon pail full of rust powder off the frame when I cleaned it up. I looked under the hood of my 97 1 ton dodge the other day and the wastegate had rusted and fallen off. It was still hooked to the boost line. I just shook my head and closed the hood. We had a 99 chevy truck that had big holes rusted through the frame. It is hard to wash stuff up here during the winter due to it being below freezing most of the winter. I had an oil filter rust through a couple of years ago. The state now has a salt and calcium cloride only program. It has really caused some havoc up here (MAINE). They even put out liquid salt brine before it starts snowing. When I worked at a highway department I would actually take a paint brush and paint chassis grease on the oil pans of the trucks. I mix up a mix of diesel fuel and bar and chain oil, put it in a garden sprayer and wet the whole under carrage of the truck. ITS A GREAT LIFE.

[TWorline]

Here is a post from another site on using linseed oil as a rust preventative: http://www.turbodieselregister.com/forums/1st-generation-ram-forum-1989-1993/180676-salt-help.html

[dpuckett]

This doesnt really relate to the rust issues, but it gripes my behind that local governments decide to salt roads instead of spreading cinder or sand. The latter 2 have to be cheaper than salt, plus I KNOW cinder offers more traction. I know, people cant drive for crap in any kind of weather, so why should a wet road be preferrable to an icy road? Let them go in the ditches and pile up on the curbs. I had to deal with an overload of salt in KY when "Ice Storm '09" came through. Fortunately, the front half of the underside of my pickup has enough oil coating it I'm not that worried about it.

Dan

[Richie O]

If you guys want to read a boring post here you go. The salt is applied to the road just before or at the very beggining of the storm. If it is applied before the storm it is mixed with water to a specific percentage. They put it in a tank truck with a spray bar. It drys and leaves a salt residue on the pavement. When it starts snowing the salt layer on the road keeps the snow from freezing or sticking to the road. The road gets covered but does not stick to the road. That allows the plows to remove all the snow instead of it sticking on the road and buiding up ice. Salt only works til around the high teens low 20's. If it gets colder then that they add either liquid calcium cloride that is sprayed directly onto the spinner as the salt is spread or some times they mix flake cloride into the load. I have had storms where it was down to around 0 and put heavy calcium spray on the salt ( couple hundred gallons to 7 yards salt ) and had water running down the street. My route was a downtown area and they did not allow sand due to the mess it makes as the year goes on. The downtown area did not want the dust and the heavy spring clean up from sand. We had our truck calibrated so we knew how much we put down per mile. The newer trucks have a onboard computer that dispenses the correct poundage per mile. If the truck speeds up the bed chain speeds up. When the truck stops the chain will stop. The state claims that salt and cloride are better for the environment then sand is. I do not understand how dirt from a gravel pit is worse on mother nature then all the salt they use now. Most town highway departments still use sand. It is cheaper. When I used to put up the sand piles I would mix about 1.5 yards salt to 12 yards sand. That is a very heavy mixture and most do not go that heavy. On my personal pile this year I put about 12 yards salt into 200 yards sand. As far as I am concerned the sand can not be replaced totally as the state would like. They want every town to go to salt only. Not going to happen. My town I live in has around 60 miles of roads that the local contractor that won the bid plows. They use around 20 to 30 tons of salt per storm as well as many more loads of sand. Makes me wonder why the cars and trucks turn into powder. Speech over.

[PToombs]

You want to know why they use salt? Lawsuits. If the court is willing to give some dumb bitch that spilled hot McD's coffee in her lap a million dollars, what do you think they'll do with the states money? I see them here throwing salt down hours before it starts snowing. Why? So people can see it. It doesn't do any good, the cars pound it to dust and it blows or rolls off the highway. The salt has to be wet to start working. That's why they use brine, already liquid, starts melting fast.

On another note, when I tried to remove the pintle hitch from the receiver on my truck, it wouldn't come out. I had a payloader's bucket on the rear frame, and was yanking with a backhoe. I just pulled the truck out from under the bucket. I cut the reciever off and took it to work. I had 60 TONs on the press when I started to heat the receiver. It popped, and I kept pushing it out. It took 20 tons to push the hitch most of the way out of the tube. I cleaned it up and it works good. The pintle is a little loose in the hole though.