I love to sandblast. Seriously. There is no comparable bang for the buck. The cost of admission is low—if you already have a suitable air compressor–operator skill is minimal and the outcome is way out of proportion to the scant input. Besides that, it’s just plain fun. You get to dress up like one of the sand people in Star Wars, employ low tech Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), blasting hood, goggles, ear plugs, dust mask or respirator, gloves. It’s effective, efficient, and requires little in the way of intelligence, focus, concentration or anything else that we generally celebrate as human attributes. It’s about as Zen an industrial process as one can find.
Anyone of my vintage—I’m sixty two—getting into auto restoration is probably far beyond working at any sort of crummy entry level job and has little desire to revisit one. Not me! Sandblasting is the perfect vehicle to put me back in touch with my roots. Of course if I had to do it for a living I wouldn’t be as enamored with the process.
My intention in restoring old number 818650BW is to do as much of the work as possible with my own hands. Ninety nine percent of restoration is just donkey work anyhow and I’ve established enough serious jackass cred over the decades to insure my qualifications are unimpeachable. So, fire up the compressor, pull the trigger and let it rip!
It feels pretty good at the end of a nice summer day to admire the beautiful, grey toothed finish of freshly-blasted, sixty year old steel. It makes a hot shower and a cold beer all the more satisfying…
Car in Tow 
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