Here's what I'm working on today. A rust bubble formed under the right side roof rail foundation at the front. Water pools under these things (FYI). There is a single rubber gasket you see at the bottom of it which the bolts should seat into, but over time, water got through the paint on the forward most bolt on mine. The rust pushed the paint and gasket up, letting more water in over time.

Halfway through correcting it now. Chipped it out with a screwdriver, cleaned it with a Dremel wire wheel and rust converter (mostly phosphoric acid gel stuff from Rustoleum), and sealed it with primer. Next up is Bondo filler putty, sand, then reprime and paint.



One comment, Nissan HSLA steel is pretty magic, there was water inside the rust bubble when I chipped it out but plenty of good metal left underneath. It was nowhere near working its way into the roof liner, which is what I was worried about.

When I'm done, I'll take photos that explain how to get the roof rack off. It's a lot easier than you think. It The rail pivots on the center mount to an angle...slide back, then it pops right off.

I couldn't get the base coat as flat as I'd hoped with brushes, so I am waiting until tomorrow when I get some replacement parts for my compressor. Should look great in the end though...

So all done. Good news, my Iwata airbrush can push auto touchup paint and clear coat at 1:1 paint to thinner. Bad news, for some reason, when painting the roof (a horizontal surface) the color comes out a lighter blue. No idea why, I asked the company and they are contemplating it. It brushes on exactly right, and when I airbrushed a vertical surface it was pretty close. So it's not a thinner issue, or a metallic flake clog, etc.

Air brush common law says if your brush isn't clogging a larger nozzle doesn't matter, but I have the bigger nozzle coming from Amazon anyway so I can at least try lower pressure, higher volume. If I can get it the right color, I'll do it again. But meanwhile, my truck is de-rusted and watertight! It's a pretty innocuous spot on the roof that few people will ever notice, so not going to lose sleep over it. The California cost to have a body shop do the same would be about the same as the trade in value of my 17 year old truck.




If you have to remove the roof rack, here's what the middle pedestal looks like. This should tell you what you need to know! After removing the cross bars, and removing the three bolts at the front and rear ends of the roof rack, you a.) slide the rail backwards, then b.) turn it about 60 degrees out to get that oval shape out of a keyed hole in the rack. Not sure it's obvious otherwise.

So the lighter shade problem bothered me too much. Just tried a bigger 0.5mm nozzle to see if that would fix whatever was happening with metallic flake separation. Test painting worked, so I should be able to touch up everything on my truck accurately from here on out!

Keep the updates coming. We're all going to have to go through this sooner or later.

Looks great so far and looks like you're almost at the finish line.

Great work and an awesome update!

Thread promoted to Sticky!

I'll get back to this soon - I have a backlog of things I need to do on the truck and the motorcycle. That repair is watertight and won't rust through the roof, which is the most important thing. But there's a ding on my fender from a Whistler trip that must be filled and repaired soon.

Would say once I get the mixture and psi settings down, this is something pretty much anyone could do across any of our paints since we have some good color match sources that didn't exist online ~10 years ago. I got a cheaper airbrush to try with a large diameter needle (so as not to trash my expensive ones with polyurethane), so the total cost should be less than what any body shop in America would charge you, and without setting up a paint shop.