This is a total mystery.  Shoved my Fabia Estate Candy White through a car wash today. 

Got cloth to dry bits missed by blowers and got stopped in my tracks. As you all know the estate has a perfectly flat horizontal shelf just below the bottom edge of the tail gate.

It was covered in hundreds or thousands of tiny light brown specks the size of a newspaper full stop. Or a Briskoda full stop. .... ...... .. .....

After I cancelled the heart attack I almost had I checked the rest of the car.  Nothing anywhere.  Not a single speck. I used a magnifying glass.

The specks could be felt by finger tips and snagged on my thumb nail as I pushed it through them.  One or two flew off but the vast majority stayed put no matter how hard I bashed them with my thumb nail. 

I tried soapy water. Neat washing up liquid. Meths. Hammerite thinners.  Nothing touched them. A thirty year old tin of weird  American polish with a warning it is slightly abrasive did nowt.

The upturned ends of the shelf had no spots--only the flat surface facing the sky.

After about four hours rubbing the shelf with a worn out green and yellow dish wash sponge and Car Care polish used with all the pressure of my thumb hand and arm I have shifted 90 per cent. I may stop there.  I can barely form my hand into a fist tonight !!

This will have to go top of my total mystery list. Probably oddest thing ever to happen to me.

Asking you all--any ideas seems a long shot but who knows?.  Thank you for reading.

Give up and fit a black plastic or aluminium cover to the bumper top. I suspect the spots are rust particles, been anywhere near someone doing welding or cutting?

Fallout of particles of ferrous metal, often released by nearby industry, trains or agricultural machinery. The rain washes them down onto horizonal surfaces where they settle and get stuck in pores in the paint. Then they rust in place leaving the observed orange spots.

 

You can get specialist chemicals (like Iron-X, other brands are available) to remove it, which I personally prefer to mechanical/abrasive approches. Wash and rinse thoroughly after use and reapply a hard wax treatment.

Edited 5 September, 20196 yr by ettlz

That is a brilliant idea---rusty particles. Thank you both.  No idea where they could have come from and really do not believe they were there before it went into the wash booth.  They were so obvious after the wash they were impossible to miss.  Perhaps they were covered by the dust and muck the car wash removed.

The whole shelf looked like a maniac barista had shaken his cocoa pot over the thing. It really was a jaw drop moment.  And why were there no spots anywhere else?

Other ideas.  The car spent the whole of August in an airport car park outdoors but under one of those sail like taut canvas shades.  Do aircraft produce iron filings?  There had been no metal cutting done any where around.

When I think about it that shelf is the only surface that is perfectly flat and does gather and retain water during rain storms. And does take a while to dry out by evaporation. It annoys me a lot to be honest. ( Like the size and position of all four  direction indicators --both lousy) . I will look into Iron-x.

Thank you for your replies.

8 hours ago, HopeImRight said:

When I think about it that shelf is the only surface that is perfectly flat and does gather and retain water during rain storms.

 

Yes. Mine had loads of fallout contamination in the same area when first delivered. (Car came from UK stock so presumably had been stored outside near heavy plant activity.)

Just space debris burning up, or maybe an asteroid or two - maybe!

 

I did not think that UK had any heavy industry now, its all flat out for reducing our emissions and buying from another country who we will point the finger at for being dirty and missing their emissions reduction targets, oh and making people unemployed and complaining about them being lazy, called blue sky thinking, marvelous - not!

 

Edit:- I was talking to US cousin recently, she is not a Trump follower, but, she was confused about me thinking that UK should still be manufacturing things, so people just don't get it, manufacturing generates wealth and feed the government's need for taxes to feed their games.

Edited 6 September, 20196 yr by rum4mo

Just another thought on this topic.  All these tiny ferrous particles floating about ---do we breath them in ?  Day in day out.

I know we need iron to survive but I don't want to sniff it up my nose.  Time to wear a mask all day like the Japanese.

I've forgotten if its been said already in this thread, but it seems that any/all cars transported by rail will suffer like this as the brake blocks are mainly steel so it flies around from the trains they are on and from all passing trains, these cars probably get moved by train long distances to the collecting/distribution points like Emden from where they travel by sea.

You will probably find they come from closer to home if the particles are only on the rear hatch area and not the roof or bonnet.

 

Hot cast iron particles from the brakes mixed in with road filth gets lifted from under the chassis in turbulent air and deposited over the back end of the car. As they are hot, they can bond with the paint on contact. 

Had similar. My car was repaired and the tiny filings from the body left in certain areas. As the weather recently deteriorated they started to rust and became noticeable. Car also moon white. I dislodged each filing carefully with my nail and then polished furiously for a hour or so. Now remediate.