Internal decay

I cannot recall the day when I have issues raising the guitar's string height. Last weekend, when that happened due to a stiff trem post, it's not a good sign. Some contact spray was used to get things moving & that was a rather easy feat. A little probing using cotton buds revealed a serious case of internal rusting as seen above.

Two cotton buds & four very rusty tips later, surprisingly, things got cleaned up. The culprit post was throughly cleaned & oiled before reliving its days in that cavity. I couldn't imagine introducing so much moisture in there for this to happen. In fact, I didn't remove the post at all so there's no handling on my part which left two possibilities: 1) A rusty part was used to begin with 2) Someone at the factory handled the part with sweaty hands. Hmm...