I like to do a lot of my own maintence on my cars and I was just wondering how prone the underside of the 96-02s are to rusting away. I have been mostly looking for trucks from the south just for that reason. I really hate rusted bolts.

 

Colorado used to be a great place to get a rust free vehicle. They only used sand on the roads in the winter, and it was very dry to begin with, so there was very little rust here.

Unfortunately, the particulate pollution from sand was causing the Denver area to miss some EPA targets, so now they are using Magnesium Chloride (which is just as bad as salt, don't let the Dow Chemical propaganda fool you), and actual salt.

I just looked at several '96-'00 4Runners that had been in CO their whole lives, and they all had rust on the undercarriage, one even had body rust. I don't think it is quite as bad as the midwest here, but it sucks compared to what it used to be.

Mag Chloride is crap. It kills trees and rots brake pads, in addition to rusting metal. It also is treacherous when they lay it down on dry roads prior to a storm. I've spun out a couple of times on roads that had had the stuff sprayed on it, what otherwise would have been perfectly safe, dry roads. It also has been implicated in the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. It is nothing but a Dow Chemical boondoggle.

 

My 97 spends most of its time in the south but from my experience the only problems I have run into are rusted rear swaybar bolts and bumper bolts. Everything else has been relatively rust free. Oh, and I have had this truck stuck in watery mud holes for ~48hrs more than once.

 

thanks for the heads up on CO vehicles. I had always heard they did not use salt.

 

Personally, I don't think the 4Runner's undercarriage is any better (or worse) than any other vehicle of the same year on the road. It's going to rust no matter what as long as the right elements are on the road and the undercarriage has not been properly cared for.

I bought my '02 4Runner from a dealer in NY last year and the underside looked like hell. Orange from front to rear. I brought it back home to AL and discovered no major damage, just surface rust. Sanded all that crap off and undercoated it myself. Looks great now.

Although the South is a great place to buy vehicles, AL and a few other near states had a high markup on 4Runners, so I looked else where.

 

I live in Tennessee, and my 4Runner came from Detroit.....to say the least, many bolts have broken off, and my hacksaw has been my best friend as well as liquid wrench when doing anything to my 4runner. The body lift took 3 days, I'll leave it at that(putting the steering spacer in, had to hack through the bolts after liquid wrenching and getting them loose enough to get enough room for the saw blade in).

 

Well here in Texes i don't have a clue what real rust is on a car. That is until i saw a guys car from up north a few months ago. The tailgate was all rusted on the bottom where you could see through it and underneither it was scary!

There were like 10 of us from Texas all gaping at it but he just said that it was not bad for it being 10 years old. Here you see tons of 10 year old cars without a spor of rust. Like an 88 Civic i used to have, it didn't have a spec of rust on the whole thing.

So i guess Texas would be a good place to get one but the markup here is worse than some places.

 

Texas and Arizona are your best bets, of course need to make sure if you are buying from there that those 4Runners weren't shipped there from another state (do a carfax).

I'm in the same boat as RockSlide. I too got mine from the east via an autobroker and when it got to colorado there was enough surface rust to bug me. I've already ordered and replaced alot of the bolts (which range anywhere from a buck to 2 bucks) since I too hate rusty bolts.

I've been coating my new bolts with Fluid Film for the most part.