In the never ending quest to keep making small improvements, my wife pointed out the rocker sills looked pretty crappy with rust showing around the screw holes. I knew they’ve looked bad for a long time, but just didn’t pay all that much attention to them. They are aftermarket GMC sills, and have been deteriorating almost since the day I bought them back in 1998. I wouldn’t have bought them in the first place, except my truck came with one Chevy and one GMC rocker sill. Looking back, the mismatched originals were nearly twice as thick and the aftermarket versions.
Anyway the new ones have been getting rusty right along, so I decided to paint them wrinkle black just to be different. That was, until I took them off. The tops looked bad enough, but the bottoms have been eating themselves up, and depositing rusty crap on top of the floor paint. I also forgot I had torn the front hole out of one side trying to install the Steele Products door gaskets. The door seal was so stiff, rather than compressing the gasket by tightening the sill, it simply pulled the screw right through the trim plate.
So I gave up on the wrinkle paint and ordered generic polished stainless plates like these instead:
I also had been noticing small rust blisters forming on the lower right rear tailgate, and decided it needed some attention.
Looking things over a little closer, I realized there were also rust blisters on the inside near the deck level on the right side:
I pulled the tailgate and started looking it over. The first thing I noticed was there were no drain holes on the side with the rust, only the ends and one on the driver side:
So two more drain holes were added, one in the center and one on the passenger side:
After stripping the paint, the outside face of the tailgate revealed some good news. No cancer. There was surface rust trapped under the powder coating which took 14 years to reveal itself. Ground clean and treated with Picklex 20, it will be epoxy primed, filled, and the outside reshot in Blitz Black.
The inside was bad news. The blistered paint popped right through showing cancer holes, and looking inside the lower portion looks like the Titanic:
