Auto body repair & detailing: Yikes What Happen To My Paint, vancouver bc canada, tiny specks

Question
Hello
I bought a 1984 Mercedes 380 SL from Texas and had it trucked up to Vancouver BC Canada. I had the car painted almost two years ago and for some reason there are small "groups" of bumps and in some places  bubbles  all over the car that started to appear over the last 6 to 8 months.

When they were looking at the bumps they scraped a cluster of these bumps to see what was under the paint and it looks like small pin sized rust specks but yet when I talked to the guy actually doing the work on my car he told me the car had no rust on it.  (the shop also said that they did strip it down to the metal).

When I started looking around the net for some advise on how to handle this problem most of the stuff on the net (and people I talked with) seems to match "solvent pop".

The shop seems to have had trouble diagnosing the problem and said that they will go over each panel of the car and re-paint, but now,  they will "not" guarantee the job.

Do you have any idea how I should handle this with the shop? Should I be asking to re-paint the whole car? or will spot painting fix the problem? Could the shop "not" have done the paint job right in the first place? Can it have something to do with a Texas car now in Canadian climate? Please help if you can.

Thank You.

Ian


Answer
If the spots have rust in them, it sounds more like rail dust than solvent pop. Solvent pop usually affects the top coat (clear), which leaves the undercoats to protect the metal from rust. Two things I would suspect; first the original lacquer finish had degraded to the point that moisture had penetrated the soluble original finish. This would have been tiny specks, when the car was painted no one knew they were there and over time the finally worked (rusted) their way to the surface. Second I would suspect rail dust. Rail dust is where metal dust or shavings have landed on a surface, and when they contact moisture (dew, rain, car wash, etc...)they start to rust. These are almost impossible to see, until they have worked their way through the paint down to the metal. Have you ever seen new cars being delivered, and they have plastic stickers covering the horizontal surfaces. They do that so the fine metal dust from the wheels of the train doesn't settle on the cars. With the metal work that goes on in a body shop it's very easy to get rail dust on a car and not ever know it until it's too late. We blow off every car before it goes outside just incase. That's about the best guess I can make not knowing, what it was painted with, or what the bare metal was primed with. If it's still under warranty, they should repair the vehicle completly.
I hope this helps,
Shawn