Everyone knows that keeping the paint on your vehicle in the best possible shape is important to its appearance and its potential resale value, but it also is the only barrier between the sheet metal and the elements, so damaged paint can also damage the car in general.
These days there are some excellent tools and techniques that can be used to help restore old, faded and damaged paint, which is great news for a vehicle owner already facing the problem. However, prevention is always better than cure when possible, so taking better care of your vehicle’s paintwork should certainly be somewhere on your basic vehicle maintenance list.
Some things can obviously easily damage car paint – gravel roads, parking lot dings, an angry ex with a key – but some of the thing that regularly damage car paint are less than obvious.
Bird Droppings
Most vehicle owners are vaguely aware of the fact that bird droppings are not only an unsightly nuisance if they land on their car but can also cause lasting damage. For years, experts blamed the acid in bird lime for causing the damage and to a certain extent that is true. But there are other reasons as well, one very big one being the fault of the sun, especially the hot summer sun.
The problem is that when the sun’s rays heat a car’s paint lacquer it softens and expands it a little. At the same time, the sun is also causing any bird droppings on the car to harden. Then at night, when the temperatures drop and your car is parked up the paint cools, hardens once more and literally molds itself around the droppings, resulting in dulled paintwork that stays that way even once the mess has been wiped away.
Tree Sap
Do you ever park your vehicle under a tree, or several trees? If s,o then it is at risk for damage from tree sap. Wiping it off usually does not work very well either as it tends to just smear and get rubbed even deeper into the porous paint where it will slowly eat away at it.
Bugs
An Olathe, KS summer brings bugs, sometimes lots of bugs and many of them meet their end by crashing into a car. The nasty mess that is left behind after a bug/vehicle collision is more than just rather gross though. Bug guts, for want of a better description, are quite acidic, so will begin eating into your paint right away.
Sprinklers
Do your lawn sprinklers reach as far the driveway where you park your car, even if the spray is very light? If so, you are damaging your car’s paint this way as well. How could plain water cause car paint damage? Because standard household water is chock full of minerals, many of which are not at all paint friendly, so if the vehicle is getting a light soaking every time you water your lawn the paint damage will add up.
Jokers
Have you ever let your car get dirty enough that some joker has written ‘Wash me’ in the dirt? Or your kids have figured out that the dirty surface makes a great drawing board? Such things seem easy enough to wipe off, but dirt acts a lot like sandpaper when it’s dragged across car paint, which can make the marks last long after the dirt is gone.
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