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great article but I don’t think it applies here. Car has not been driven in over a month and never saw the snow or hot exhaust temp for the reaction to occur, only the wild outside temp changes and subsequent condensation in the garage. Zinc oxide is white at room temp plus it’s insoluble (the white stuff lifeguards use). I still have a sample of a bright yellow mystery dissolved in water.
great article but I don’t think it applies here. Car has not been driven in over a month and never saw the snow or hot exhaust temp for the reaction to occur, only the wild outside temp changes and subsequent condensation in the garage. Zinc oxide is white at room temp plus it’s insoluble (the white stuff lifeguards use). I still have a sample of a bright yellow mystery dissolved in water.
So what's above that spot on the floor, look upwards to see what's overhead. maybe something mixed with something else? but what would be yellow? what does it feel like? oily, watery, ?
So I did some more work on this stuff. Our analytical capabilities are somewhat limited so I enlisted the help of a friend with access to better FTIR libraries. Short version - its lead chromate. Must be in one of the additives in gasoline. Coincidentally its the same color used for school buses. No, I did not run into one.
So is that from a gas line leak or a catalytic converter issue? Since you said you didn't run over a school bus, there's something above the puddle that is creating that.
My wild guess - since lead chromate is used as a paint pigment, you ran over some painted yellow lines on the road and it got flipped up on your mufflers, and then due to some moisture/condensation cooling/heating cycle, it dripped off your mufflers onto the garage floor. Thing to do is crawl under there with a flashlight and look at your mufflers. Highly doubtful in my mind it is actually dripping from anywhere on or about your engine.
Had an incident with wife's car. Some contractor left a huge puddle of white paint at an intersection and she drove through it. Had to replace all four tires, four wheel liners and spend hours getting the paint off the body work. Amazing what that did.
That's a great deduction! And I'll put my money on it being from a freshly painted yellow stripe on the road. That happened to me once, and I was able to remove it without damage to my car.
How long have you owned the car? Just wondering if PO had install some mufflers from an Auto-breaker, they use a yellow marking paint to identify a part as theirs for warranty purpose.
Could be dye for checking leaks, on coolant or a/c system? Is your coolant in that color as well?
coolant is standard pink stuff. I saw a ford truck forum where others said the same thing dripping into snow. I reckon that cement won’t show the color but since my floor is resinous it didn’t absorb the liquid. This may be more common than we think. The lead part is troubling though. Gonna do some more research to see if it’s some other counter ion instead. It is definitely directly above the mufflers - both sides, same drip pattern.
01-14-2018, 06:52 PM
