My car...now 160K miles old, has some paint issues on the roof I would like to address. The paint is cracking and starting to chip off. I do not have money for a paint job, hoping maybe summer of '07, but I do not want to have rust starting to form. Any tips on preventing further chipping and rusting where it is already chipped? I may end up just touching up every little exposed area.

 

Try to keep your car in a garage if it is not already in one. There are cleaners you can use to remove the top layer of ozidized paint (which is just dead pigment that doesnt look very good) and this will leave a decent looking layer of paint underneath. Some of these cleaners require that you sand off the layer, and this leaves scratches that have to be polished and waxed to get out. You could get a buffer and buff some of these marks out to make it look better, wet sand before doing this. Theres a product called McGuires 3 Step that I've heard is pretty good and I plan to use that on my car when I get the money for it (dont think its expensive or anything, I just wanna customize my intake and exhaust first and get rid of some of those restrictions, and possibly drop a new 350tpi in cuz mines gettin kinda old). As for preventing further chipping and rust, a paint job would really be the best choice, but since u dont wanna do one, I really cant think of anything other than keeping it out of the sun and extreme weather and being very careful when you wash the car and spending a long time doing it, no cutting corners, and use professional shampoos and stuff. If you posted a pic of the car, I'm sure we could find an solution much faster too, cuz I just went on a whim and posted what I think might fix your car.

 

Keep wax on it! This should help as much as possible with the rusting. You can actually wax bare metal and it won't rust.