Rust? In Oregon? The land of the healing rains? Well, actually we do have a rust belt, but it’s very narrow; more like a Rust Ribbon. It hugs the Pacific Coast, and extends inland from the water line, somewhere from 100 yards to 1000 yards, more or less. That’s actually hard to pin down as local micro-climates—which are rampant on the West Coast—can substantially shrink or expand that.
But here’s a salty dog that’s lived just two or three blocks from the bay in Waldport, Oregon probably all or much of its life. And quite obviously the near perpetual salty fog and breezes have had their way with this Celebrity. Since we’ve celebrated Celebritys numerous times here,and spent so much extolling their many virtues, let’s just mainly focus on the rust, which presents itself quite differently than the cancer found in the true Rust Belt. Time for a clinical analysis.
This is where I found the patient, and there’s the cause of its disease clearly visible in the back, the bay at Waldport. It lives here, as its elderly and sea-weathered owner came out of the house, which bears the faded sign of the “Copper Crab”. I suspect he was a fisherman or crabber in his working days.
We had just finished a delicious take out seafood dinner from the Salty Dawg, an old-school joint right on the dock. That’s the ocean just past the bridge.
Before we examine the patient, let’s confirm its identity: a 1989 Chevrolet Celebrity. By this time, the A-Body Celebrity was already a bit geriatric, the kind of basic, cheap, transportation one might expect an older or retired fisherman in Waldport would buy, although I would guess it probably started its life as a rental, as so many of its ilk did. Ah, happy memories of A-Body rentals. The problem was remembering which brand you were driving so you could find it again in a convention center parking lot.
This one is packing the 2.8 V6, blessed with fuel injection by then. A roarty and familiar motivator of so many rental cars over the years.
Let’s start our tour at the front; this is the leading edge of the hood. Note the two carcinomas: like so many of their kind, they appear to have been formed by salty condensation that eventually found its way to the end of the hood panel, and decided to go to work there. The exact details of the initial formation of salt air rustanoma is not always perfectly explainable, but the generalized pattern tends to follow the gravity-fed flow of salty condensation.
The “hood emblem” just above the carcinoma is well located, right where some cars might proudly wear a badge. In this case, it’s a lichen. Sorry, but I can’t identify the species. There’s a progression to them appearing too: fir (or other) pollen builds up an organic layer on cars that don’t get washed regularly, and that gives a toehold to lichens. Moss is next, and I’ve shown you some good examples of those in the past. Although out here on the coast, moss might not like the salty “soil”, and take a pass.
The roof shows an interesting pattern. My diagnosis is that salty condensation rolled forward on the gently sloping roof, and was dammed by the once-intact windshield weatherstripping. Once underway, the corrosive pool was blown back across the roof. I suspect that this Celebrity has spent a lot of time puttering around town at 20-30 mph, which would help support my thesis. Or I could be blowing smoke out my exhaust.
Here we see the roof rust from a different vantage point. The gray-black discoloring is from the pollen, as previously noted. It adheres, and then dirt and other organic debris adheres to it, and creates a certain admixture that becomes remarkably well adhered. It takes some powerful detergent and a Brillo pad (or equivalent) the remove it.
The black window frames and B pillar show fairly strong signs of surface oxidation, in a more uniform pattern.
Since we’re here, let’s move the probe closer to the window and examine the patient’s innards. Obviously the steel outer skin is acting as a sacrificial element to protect the vital insides from the carcinoma. Things look about as healthy in here as any 1989 Celebrity ever did, which is not saying much.
The setting sun created glare in my device, so it’s hard to judge just how well these innards have been preserved. But do we really want to know? I would be quite happy to never sit in a Celebrity again.
Let’s step back and to the rear. Yes, this is where the disease is most advanced. Diseases, actually.
There’s an interesting band of oxidized steel just below the rear window, which must have had inferior rust preventive measures than the rest of the body. And the trunk shows very advanced signs of organic “soil” development. Perhaps the patient spent much of its time in a too-short carport, with its tail sticking out?
The most fascinating developments of this disease are to be seen in the trunk lid’s rear vertical component. Here the maker’s plastichrome name plate is the only thing still intact. Fascinating.
The center area is also severely involved, and is actually shedding its skin, as can be seen by the detritus adhered to the bumper.
Which brings us back to the point of the beginning, and a perfect example of advanced sea salt cancer. My only hope is that the patient lives another ten years, so that we can come back and note the advancement if the disease. I’m not terribly optimistic of that, but these can be remarkably persistent patients.
Postscript: Here’s a couple of shots and a video of our recent van trip to the northern Oregon Coast:
Hart Cove, Cascade Head, Oregon. A spectacular hike to a remote cape overlooking Hart Cove, where the fog lifted just as we arrived, affording stellar views. There’s a waterfall in a cleft in the rocks at the far left of the cove, but hard to see. Hence the name Cascade Head.
Harts’s Cove is around the rocks to the left. It was all totally fogged in until just as we arrived. Constant sound of sea lions on the rocks below, which really got the dog’s attention.
A short video of the fog lifting at Hart’s Cove.
A typical Oregon beach on a weekend in July. Social distancing comes easy out here.
Thanks for posting your photos from your recent van trip. They are as uplifting as the Celebrity shots are depressing.
I frined once wanted to sell me his 10 year old chrysler minivan (forget the year) for a good price. I had my mechanic look at it, he put it on thr lift and it was rusted out totally underneath. “How could be that bad underneath and looked ok otherwise?” I asked the mechanic. He new the seller, “its johns van, u know where he lives right? His house is right on the ocen” . So i passed on that van.
We just traded our 2003 Dodge minivan with 140k miles. Though it looked really good, it too was a rusted mess underneath. Two of the jacking points had rusted away and were missing, a few other critical mounting points on the undercarriage were in bad shape and the straw that broke the camels back was the rear axle that was completely rusted through and would need to be replaced. It was so bad that the sides were tissue thin, and, while on the rack, the rear wheels were drooping. We don’t live anywhere near the ocean, the van was just a “B” grade car at best.
That 4th generation of Chrysler minivan (2001-07) was a real step backwards in rustproofing from any that came before or after it. In the midwest these suffered from lots of visible rust-through low on the sides and at the low edges of hood and hatch. I can only imagine what they all looked like underneath.
I had a similar experience with a Dodge Caravan I looked at once. It was a great red color, perfect paint, dark gray interior. Clean alloys. I looked underneath and it had the damp, crunchy, soggy feel of corrosion on parts of the bottom and I had to pass. I never found another one in that color and was really bummed about the mushy bottom.
As one who has lived a lifetime in an environment with a high incidence of such carcinomas, these all make sense to me.
The hood and decklid rusting is due to condensation that forms on the inside of the panel due to humid air in the car and cool nights. That condensation rolls to the lowest place – the underside of the hood’s leading edge and decklid’s trailing edge. The rust begins out of sight, then begins to blister the paint as it works its way around to the “public” side of the panel edge, at which point the rust is feasting on both the inside and outside of the panel at the same time.
Those issues on the roof appear to be surface rust that probably got its start with delaminating white paint on the roof, which exposed primer, which could not hold the moist salty air away from the steel beneath. And as you note there were extra problems around that windshield seal, so it would not surprise me to see a rust hole up at the front of the roof.
The lichen and mold issues on the paint are foreign to my area, and are amazing to look at.
Years ago a friend found himself in Los Angeles with his old 1980 A-body Le Mans coupe from Ontario, Canada. It had typical Rust Belt oxidation underneath, not too bad, but the body still looked good.
The auto mechanic at the local garage was fascinated and had never seen a rusty undercarriage before. Of course rust was rare and coastal top- down rust like this Celebrity was the only type he’d seen. Bottom-up rust was a novelty.
So was the Ontario license plate, which, in Ontario, California caused some confusion.
Living in Tennessee, I’m not too conversant with rust issues and definitely not salt air, but the pollen/dirt nexus is omnipresent.
My father parked his Taurus under a white oak tree for an extended period while he was using garage space to build an airplane (called a Cozy). The layer of greenish/yellow pollen on the Taurus gradually turned black with dirt.
I took it to a touchless car wash for a quick fix. This place used high pressure jets of water in a zigzag pattern in lieu of brushes. As you can guess, all it did was put a zigzag clean stripe all over the car.
I used a Dobie, a sponge with a plastic mesh intended for pots and pans, to get the rest of the gunk off. Not a Brillo pad. Yikes. The Dobie worked like a charm.
The coast is lovely. And I’ve always wanted to see some of Conde McCullough’s bridges in person.
Remarkable pictures and story.
I’ve never seen rust like that. Here it always starts at the bottom. My ’05 Taurus had holes in the floor before it was five years old. The body still looked showroom new. That Celebrity is like a scientific experiment of a car having NEVER received a washing and your analysis seems spot on.
The shot of the roof rust on this Chevy, nicely isolated the roofline of this car. My first thought was that it could just as easily have been a Buick LeSabre of the same year. I never noticed that similarity until now. Nice photography.
Is this Chev destined to become a rust survivor as decrepit as the “Chicago Cutlass”?
Not nearly as bad as when I lived in Hawaii for a few years, I have lived in the salt air belt near Los Angeles the rest of my life. 1970’s vehicles seemed to rust the worst here, from the top down, of course. GM and Honda were the glaring examples. GM switched to water based paints in its California assembly plants for the 1973 model year, so that is easy to explain. Even Mercedes can corrode here. A friend’s 1977 300SD had rust perforations and the aluminum hood and trunk lid were turning to powder under the paint. It had spent its entire life parked outside two blocks from the beach.
This pattern is common here 600 miles to the south, though I don’t think I’ve seen anything so extreme, and frankly, auto-geologically (and botanically) fascinating. The salt air really adds a twist to our micro-climates, and corrosion patterns on longtime local cars which are parked outside can vary wildly over just a few blocks distance from the coastline. Another variable here is the popularity of surfing … drips from a wet board wreak havoc on windshield headers; older work trucks often have even more perforation on their lumber racks, which get scratched from use and probably don’t have great paint coverage even when new. It’s not uncommon here to see nicer contractor’s trucks with stainless steel racks.
I love the badges on the trunk lid that are still hanging on despite much of what they were originally attached to going missing.
The roof rust is par for the course on GM vehicles of the era, especially white ones. The company had an issue in the early days of low-VOC paint with primer that would not hold paint through the years. We had an ’89 Corsica which got a beltline-up free repaint because of it.
Wasn’t the original 70s dystopian plan that the Celebrity was supposed to become the “fullsize” for Chevy? But things didn’t get as Mad Max as they were thinking?
I was just thinking that. In another reality, it could’ve been the Caprice. I could see hints of the Caprice in the Celebrity. Steering wheel, taillights, front clip etc.
I really enjoyed this post. My grandparents retired to Waldport so I spent a lot of time there as a kid until my widowed grandmother sold the house. The house was right on the ocean. I can sort of make out the house under the arch in the bridge pic. I haven’t been back to Waldport in 30 years, but this post makes me want to do a road trip. I’m sure the town has changed a lot since the days of going in to town in my grandfather’s ’72 Gran Torino.
Growing up in the South, my experiences with rust were quite limited. I did, however, have to remove the windshield from my ’71 Vega every few years to repair two areas along the bottom that didn’t drain properly. I got good at reinstalling using the OEM tacky rope seal.
During college, and while working at an engineering firm to help pay for same, a young lady and recent college graduate from New Jersey was hired on. She also drove a Vega, and after a few days I had to ask how it got so rusty (you could see inside the cabin through the rusted door bottoms). That was my first exposure to Salt Belt rust.
More recently, when my bride and I went to Kaua’i for our 25th anniversary, I was introduced to cars rusting out from the top down.
I remember a 65-66 Ford F100 that was bought in Florida and brought back to Minnesota. The old by a used southern car, not something that had lived its life in Minnesota. Well the body looked pretty good but when we had it on the lift the bottom side was another story. Total rust bomb, even the springs were shedding crumbs of rust.
Reminds me of a late 60s Chevy truck I used to see parked on Anza St. and 18th in San Francisco’s Richmond District. At 48th street you have hit the end of the line and could say Land’s End once past Sutro Heights park which overlooks Ocean Beach. I swear you could look through the truck from the street, at door level. and see the sidewalk on the other side through the truck.
Salt air rust out is what we get here being a small set of islands its hard to get very far from the coast and if you do you are possibly going to be in a volcanic zone sulphur is far harder on cars than salt it will disolve plastic badges if left long enough, of course our six monthly inspection regime has grown more anal every year reguarding rust to the point where you arent allowed any at all the surface rust that is growing well on the roof of my Hillman could become a problem yet This Celebrity would have been put off the road long ago and by now would have made its final roadtrip to Glenbrook and be rebar.
At least it won’t need collision insurance.