| You can’t avoid someone opening a car door into yours, but you can keep your car washed and waxed. Dirt and sun are the worst things for your car’s paint, which will last 30-40% longer if the car is kept out of the sun. New Mexico is the UV capital of the world, and those damaging UV rays, and our famous dirt roads, kill paint jobs.
Rust is not a big problem here in New Mexico. All we ever get is surface rust, not the type of cancerous rust that eats away metal. There’s the rust you see when you scratch the paint or chip it; if you don’t care about the scratch, don’t spend a lot of money fixing the chip – that rust won’t eat the metal. You can get cancerous rust down low in your car because of silt dust that collects in the double panels. Using a jet wash is the best way to get rid of some of the silt between the panels, but even so you’ll never get rid of it all.
The only places that get a lot of rust are places that get a lot of moisture. Tommy worked in the auto body business in both New York and California and did a lot of rust repair, especially in California, as the shop was located near the beach. He says, “In the twenty years that I’ve been in Albuquerque, I’ve done less than one repair a year for cancerous rust.”
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