Magnesium anode - rust prevention?

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Was watching this video where at 4:05 they open up a water heater to find it's completely corroded. The root cause, at 4:25 is that "sacrificial" magnesium anode rod was gone.

My question is, has anyone on this forum tried strapping magnesium to a frame or a subframe of their vehicle to prevent corrosion? Was there any effect? Should any effect be expected?

Video:
 
This question gets asked every once in a while. I think the premise is good but you're frame and a hot water heater are in two different environments. The hot water heater is submerged in water where your frame is not. They put those anodes on boat hulls because they are submerged in water. I don't think it really works on a vehicle frame because it's not submerged in water.
 
Its standard on steel boats, and for metal components on plastic and wooden boats. Also pipeliines. also impressed voltage, where the object to be protected has electrons pushed into it.

Isn't supposed to work on cars because the environment isnt sufficiently conductive, but I havnt tried it.
 
It won't work because the sacrificial anode only protects to a finite distance. One or a handful of anode won't be enough to protect a vehicle from rusting away. If it did work, you'd see nearly every car up north fitted with anodes, and places like Krown would be out of business.
 
Originally Posted By: Kestas
It won't work because the sacrificial anode only protects to a finite distance. One or a handful of anode won't be enough to protect a vehicle from rusting away. If it did work, you'd see nearly every car up north fitted with anodes, and places like Krown would be out of business.


In a sense galvanized steel is just a distributed sacrificial anode, which gets around the distance problem.
 
Body off and galvanize the frame. Works every time
laugh.gif
 
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