Winter protection

[quee2646]

Hello guys!

I'd like some advice on looking after my Minor during the winter. I plan to keep using it every weekend or so. The underside was Waxoyled in the spring; should I redo this on a yearly basis, or more often? I've heard people say they rinse the top and common rust spots with water after a drive: is this a good idea, and should I be rinsing where its been Waxoyled or is this unnecessary?

Any advice would be very much appreciated. I'll try and avoid salt, but I'd obviously like to take every precaution.

Thanks!

[SteveClem]

I hose down the underside after a winter drive on potentially salty roads and let things dry out as much as possible before garaging them. I keep a tubular greenhouse heater under each car to keep them dry.
Waxoyling should be ok for a couple of years if it's been applied well,just keep an eye on it.

[Trickydicky]

If your keeping it in a garage then I would install a desk fan on a timer switch,coming on every couple of hours to keep the air moving around the car.

[quee2646]

Thanks for the advice.

It's not kept in a garage. I have a Stormforce cover, though to be honest I'm not sure if it's better on or off!

[The vast minority]

One important bit of advice, never use warm water for washing a car in winter. Only use cold, the colder the better. Believe me the car won't mind a bit but the salt will be washed off in a much less reactive condition.

Warm salt water solution is many times more corrosive than cold water salt solution.

[oliver90owner]

Sorry but absolute twaddle. For the very short time it takes to remove this salt? Is that salt not likely to be damp already, so in rather high concentration?

No, go ahead and use warm water, if that is what you wish. It will make no difference at all and be better than leaving the salt there because it would otherwise be too cold to do the job.

Dry salt is non-conducting electrically (used as a filling in mains fuses, per eg), so do keep these cranky ideas in check. Washing the salt away is the important point. One theoretical point, but entirely irrelevant, is that common salt is less soluble in boiling water than at lower temperatures! Using washing up liquid will also be a source of salt (salt is used as a thickener in many household products (detergents, thick bleach, shampoos, shower gel, etc.).

So final rinsing with clean water is far more important than temperature (within reason).

But the advice of keeping hot water away from cold windscreens can, in some situations, avoid cracking. Usually where there is a small crack already, which propagates at alarming speed if the screen is subjected to a rapid change of temperature on one side of the glass (causing differential expansion).

[The vast minority]

A rather brutal attempt to discredit my opinion, one can only wonder at your motive.....

Clearly you consider yourself more knowledgable on the subject of corrosion than I and believe me fella, I'm more than happy to allow you to continue in that notion.

The simple fact is, our opinions differ, I'm plenty man enough to leave this here without calling into question your own views or suggesting they are less than accurate.

So there.......

[Budgie]

Moving on So if your using your car as a daily driver in all weather conditions the best you can do, ...in my humble opinion,... is to ensure the whole underneath of the car is well and truly saturated in wax oil or other well known coatings and redo every year. Not much else you can do really.

[RobThomas]

The corrosion rate in seawater is a function of a large number of mutually dependent factors. Corrosivity of natural water increases proportionally with salinity. If salinity exceeds 3 %, water corrosivity decreases (Kirk and Pikul 1990). This phenomenon is caused by the fact that corrosion rates tend to increase when water conductivity increases. The higher the salinity is, the lower the oxygen solubility is (Weiss 1970). Thus, above 3 % salinity, the corrosion rate in seawater decreases.

As the temperature decreases, the maximum salt solubility also decreases (Helber et al. 2012; Bingham et al. 2010), which causes seawater to exhibit lower conductivity and higher electrolyte resistivity (Sharqawy 2013; Sasidhar and Vijay Kumar 2008). The lower the temperature is, the greater the oxygen solubility in water is and the greater the corrosion rate may be.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4064120/

Interesting. With ocean salinity at about 8% you get lower corrosion than in-shore waters. Not sure what road salt would give to the underside of a car but probably quite high. Once again it seems there is more to this than meets the eye.

If you want to get into it, http://www.electrochemsci.org/papers/vol6/6126424.pdf

I had my new castings made in LM25 because it is a marine-grade of alloy designed not to corrode, unlike factory castings. I wonder if Zinc dust might be a worthwhile addition to the sills of the car???

[Budgie]

Pixie dust would be better.

[SteveClem]

Moving on So if your using your car as a daily driver in all weather conditions the best you can do, ...in my humble opinion,... is to ensure the whole underneath of the car is well and truly saturated in wax oil or other well known coatings and redo every year. Not much else you can do really.

Yes,I think so. Apart from injecting cavity wax periodically.

[MikeNash]

Regarding hosing beneath, Quee, I got a cheap pressure hose (for under £50 from Lidl or Aldi I think) which makes the job much easier if a bit messier. I'm always surprised by how much crap it gets off. Luckily I've a garage so I let the Trav drip for a while before I put it away and then put on a cheap fan heater under it, one of those which wave about. In the open air you've probably enough breeze to do the drying.
Regards, MikeN.
PS I connect the hose to the mains supply, of course, and never use sea water. Ouch!