Here I was thinking blonde jokes were not OK.
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Most imported cars travelled as deck cargo until car carriers appeared in the eighties. Whether that had much to do with rust though is another question, and probably had more to do with the rustproofing than the sea passage or the steel quality.
Rustproofing of almost all cars was very much an afterthought until surprisingly recently. I remember that in the 1960s BMC introduced what they claimed was the first proper rustproofing in Australia, and in some high rust areas it seems to have actually helped sales, but whether the rustproofing or the advertising did it is possibly another matter.
Agreed. FIAT and Alfa and Lancia were notorious. The backlash against those marques was huge, so much so that Alfa Romeo published films showing the new full dip galvanising process they began to use. FIAT and Lancia withdrew from our market.
I have had a number of old FIATs, and one Alfa. I loved every one of them, but sadly rust killed them all.
Speaking of Russian steel, my dad had a Niva in the 80s. FIAT derived pretty much everything, but built like a tank.
Hi,
Cars rust out very quickly on Flinders Island. We hired a relatively new Holden there in the early 60s. The floor panels were so rusted there were large patches missing.
Cheers
The Rotary Dip BMC use in Australia was very good . The cars would rotate as they passed through different tanks of chemicals & paint, Leyland used an electro static paint system , this was not so good . We had lots of paint warranty clams with this system. They also started bringing the car up from Sydney by train & the cars would have rust bleed stains on the bonnet & roof from hot metal fragments from the exhaust to the diesel train. Another problem was by the 1st service the cars were developing wheel bearing noise caused by the sideward rocking of the train & wearing groves in the bearing races. They went back to delivering the cars to Brisbane by truck after that. We had early problems with the truck drivers chaining them down by the rear subframes & bending them but that was quickly fixed . In the early days the cars that came in from the UK had a thick coating of wax to protect them from the salt spray on the trip over, It was about a 3hr job to clean that off with a special solvent & then we had to polish the cars as well, so the Pre Delivery was almost a full days job.