Hot on the heels of finding a small amount of rust on my rear-right wheel well back in January, which has been slathered with lithium grease since then...
......I just noticed THIS peeking out from behind the trim panel on my trunk lid this afternoon:
Uh oh...trying to get that trim panel off is a bit of a faff, but I took the interior trim panel off inside the trunk lid to look behind it and...
Great, that is a lot of rust coming through around the license plate light and trim panel clip holes...
No water leaking in as in no pool of water in my trunk, and I don’t see any anywhere but this is proper sad Oppo, as I quite like my little Accent and am torn now.
It’s got 155,000kms on it, which isn’t a lot by a lot of people’s standards, but things rust a lot here as I live near the Atlantic and Canadian winters mean salted roads and you don’t see many cars in good shape past 200,000kms here usually...hell, I get it undercoated (though not Krown or Rust Check) every year. Sure, it’s not bad rust, and I will get the rust on the wheel well fixed in a week or two as (as far as I know) there isn’t any anywhere else on the body, so the body should be OK for awhile...but this feels like a “beginning of the end” as it’s probably only going to get worse.
Do I just start driving it until it rusts out without getting the rust fixed...? With my logic hat on, it’s a basic ecobox that isn’t worth squat anyway at this point, so that would be the logical thing to do....but it’s not ‘just a car’ to me as mom likes to say...it’s a loyal companion and a buddy that has carried me through all sorts of events in life.
A used hatch from the local pick and pull yard would be $70, plus the cost of the parts on it if I don’t decide to strip mine first. I’d need two people to get it off though, and none of my friends are ‘car guys’ enough to help me there, plus the yard is over an hour away, and I’d have to swap it onto my car in their parking lot...
*sigh*...poor Humdrum...