Here’s the hood after soda blasting – it took care of pretty much everything but the surface rust under the factory color – I guess the flat black held its own after all.

After spending pretty much half the day with 80-grit sanding discs and the DA, here’s what I came up with. Now it’s almost ready for primer.

And after spending half a day hard sanding the hood, I decided to use some chemical stripper to get the rest of the old factory paint off. MUCH faster!

The paint stood no chance against the stripper – it cooked for about a half hour, then I unceremoniously scraped it off into the trash bag.

Even though [to my surprise] the shop was open today, I managed to get the areas I stripped paint from yesterday sanded down to bare metal. All that’s left to strip off is the trunk opening surround and door jambs.