How are these holding up in the salt belt?

Wondering how these trucks are holding up to rust and corrosion. Up in New England we get hit pretty hard with road salt 5 months a year. My tacoma had frame perforation and got replaced under the recall. Plenty of other things since have become afflicted ( trailer hitch, fuel door, virtually all hardware attached to the frame). Any frame issues on the tundras?

 

not particularly for the 2nd gens. But in your area any auto can have issues if not maintained. Fluid film before the winter weather should be all you need.

 

I live in Minnesota and just bought a truck from Wisconsin, both famous for our snow, and Wisconsin likes to over-utilize salt in their sand-salt mix. My Tundra is a 2016, and it had a few small spots underneath I wasn't particularly wild about.

I bought a thing of POR-15 and took the OEM running board/steps off the truck, and went underneath with a brass bristle brush expecting to spend a lot of time handling the worst.

I was delightfully wrong. Most of the rust was very surface, a lot of it was just from the stupid steel brackets for the running boards, and wiped right off the surface of the paint. There was maybe... total? about 4 inches of spots that I ended up actually going through and brushing away actual rust from. Brushed, washed with soapy water, degreased, used the POR-15 etching stuff, washed again, and applied POR-15 in two thin coats, and it was done. Took me about an hour and a half to do both sides along the rocker, just addressing the couple of spots I didn't like along the rocker inner side of the pinch weld, and the very bottom of the pinch weld itself. My Tundra is white and the POR-15 is gloss black, so I was expecting to have to also repaint the POR-15 and bought a can of spray Super White 040 and 2K clearcoat to conceal the POR-15 on the pinchweld - nope, can't even see that I applied any from the sides. Perfect.

After that I took it to a local truck shop that does a thixotropic underbody coating, and they also went over all the spots I'd already addressed with their coating, so it's like double-protection now. The coating they use never truly hardens and remains semi-fluid, it's something between a wax and a tar, and it's a fantastic rust preventative. They did everything under the body, brilliant work, very thorough. They also popped out all the rubber stops in the rocker and other bodywork and sprayed anti-rust wax in a 360-pattern inside all the the cavities there as well.

So, with a little bit of work, my 2016 will continue to look really great for a very long time, I anticipate. I see 2018 and newer Chevy and Fords starting to rust around my town, mine's looking pretty great with nothing actually structural starting to get grungy. My next step is to wirewheel and POR-15 my trailer hitch, and that I'll use Rustoleum semigloss to coat afterward.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, particularly when it comes to trucks. Ignore your rockers, and pay the $5k to lift off the bed and cab to cut off and weld on new metal, or throw $800 at it right away at purchase, maintain it a little for $20 a year, and have a great looking truck as long as you own it.