Mysterious Hood Rings Appear....
 

So...let the conspiracy theories abound. About two years ago I had parked my 69 in a public parking lot for an hour or two. Upon return I noticed the hood was covered in many fairly small perfectly symmetric rings in the dust. They were about the size and look as if you took a walking cane or walker and touched the bottom rubber foot with the traction rings all over the hood. Only on the upper surfaces. I thought it was a prank (not a very nice one) by somebody because my car was so dusty. It gets dusty sitting in the garage and I don't always clean it when I take it out. Needless to say, I took it home and washed it and found NO damage to the surface. I have subsequently washed and waxed the car several times.

Here is the mystery. When I let the car sit in either of my garages (I have an attached garage and a detached on my property and the car may sit in either depending on what I'm using my garages for). - After a while the rings show back up. The longer you leave them - they will begin to GROW while some new ones form. I swear - it is as strange as the crop circles that pop up in farm fields.

I KNOW the car was clean and ring free just a few days ago. I moved the car last night to use the garage - parked in the drive and put it right back in. This morning - the rings are there and forming while one is huge. I know nobody in my family is doing this.

I snapped a pic - kind of hard to see - but I think you can make out the perfectly round circle full of rings (smaller circles) until there is a dot in the middle. There are other dots on the hood and it appears they grow rings virtually overnight. You can wipe this off clean and there is no evidence of the ring once the dust is removed.

My only guess is that for some reason there are vibrations that are causing these to appear - but we are out in the country with minimal traffic.

The longer I let this sit the more will show - and the dustier it gets the more pronounced they become. NOT always in the same spots!!!!!!!!!

It is a piece of pollen or very fine hair type natural element from trees or grass. It will stick on one side and spin in the wind and eventually turn loose. I have seen it before here.

I got it!!!!


LOL

That video is awesome! The goofy thing is these circles form while in storage. I can go wash the car today and park it. In a month or so on a the dust builds up it will start the rings again. Don't even have to take it out of the shop.

makes sense there is are reinforced sections that maybe keeping one section of the hood from flexing and the other not.

curious, what is directly under that? battery?

Here is a better picture out in the sun. And...while I was busy washing my other cars for the last few hours two new rings popped up on the trunk lid. The battery is in the trunk.

If you look at the picture below you will see the one really large ring. This is the largest ring I've ever seen form. If you look to the left you will see a small one starting. They look like somebody did this with a mechanical object, but then as time goes they grow larger - appearing to add rings/layers like a tree slice.

I'm wondering if you have a ground issue?

Good question, but I can say for a fact that all on board electrical appears to be in proper order.

I had a 61 Nash metropolitan that I restored and had sitting next to the camaro. It got dust too but never developed the circles.

That was a really bad admission... and will be held against you!! LOL

gotta be static electricity from a source on the car imo. Got an alarm on it?

What about small rodent? Do mice tails wag back and forth?

I agree! You might try using a clay bar on the car followed by a good hand wax.

The kids playing with a ball in the garage?

Its consistently happening in the same spot.

So, a charge via the vechicle combined with the properties of the "dust" are creating the "sticking" as they are magnetically charged, bonding them to the deck lid.

Try waxing the hood with an synthetic wax, smaller on a molecular scale, it will help from keeping the fibers stick, charged or not....

Call you local CSI unit, there just sittin around anyway:sarcasm_smiley:

Fun stuff, glad you posted this. I love this technical stuff. I get to do it at work too, from time to time

He said it is not always in the same spot.

Does the battery post happen to be under the hood in that spot?

TRUTH!!! LoL! :trophy-1302:

Vengeance, FTW!!!

post #6 he said the battery is in the trunk

Most Likely it is a small hair like fiber that is from your wash mitt, it sticks to it a whirls around in the wind. I have seen it multiple times just on a smaller scale. Look real close and you can probably see a fiber or a spider web.

Was the hood installed with suction cups possibly?
sometimes you can see suction cup marks on glass when it gets dusty.

HEY! I found a good fix! Keep the car totally dust free and you'll never notice 'em.... HAHAHAHAHAHA

Good point. If I kept it cleaner i would never notice these. I did clay bar the car this last summer and used NXT 2.0 wax.

I will shoot some more pics this weekend. The spots will have grown.

No suction cups on it. My kid isn't around the car un-attended.

Some type of contaminate that is acting as a dust repellent. Static electricity, metal is magnetized? Does the diameter of the circle match a buffer pad? :headscratch:

I feel a great disturbance in the force around this car....it's as if millions of dust particles suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced…

I approve this message, oh great OBeer-WAN! :lol:

LMAO!!

Ants just f***ing with you, like the crop circles!:lol:

Those English hooligan ants are brutal.

O'beer, these aren't the rings you are looking for. 'Waves hand towards monitor

It's totally the ghost of Joey Ramone a lot.

If you suspend a needle from the ceiling above the circles and spin the car backwards, you'll hear "Go Lil' Camaro Go".

I have been following this post out of sheer curiosity
 

I have to say that my opinion is that Steve finally nailed it LOL :headspin:

Me? I'd wail on it with some aggressive compound, then every other stage of Meguiars, then a final with Norton Liquid Ice. The thought here is that you can always benefit from wheeling the whee out of your ride, and generating just enough heat and overall polishing effect may offset the (static?) electricity that *may* be causing this bizarre scenario. If it continued after that, I would look into offsetting this funky electrical activity (cathode / anode tech), or setting up a ground system to nail the car chassis down to mother earth with a jumper cable when parked. I (seriously) wonder what you might find if you grabbed a FLUKE meter and measured Ohms of resistance between the various areas reachable with the meter probes - body filler? Primer? Leading? It's electrical, but why? And at what level?

As I tell people around me "If that's the worst problem you've got, then you have got it made !"

No question in my mind that this is electrostatic in nature, thinking you just need to pound it harder and build more power LOL :morepower

Or? Resonant frequency? If we all had more money and time, we could pull the engine and have it rebalanced to tune out the vibes (yeah, sure, why not LOL).

Try leaving the hood open when parked to see what happens. :headscratch: