Driveway is a sandbox...

I decided to start working on the hood today, this is after 5 hours of sandblasting and using my dual action sander.  My hands started to cramp up after holding the vibrating materials for so long.

The sandblasting process takes a lot of time and makes a huge mess... BUT it also gets down in every nook and cranny unlike sandpaper which sands across dings and divots.  Sandblasting is fast in that it cleans down to bare metal in seconds.  It takes a lot of time because you blast a small area at a time, so it's like coloring the entire hood with a Fat sharpie. As you can see in the bottom pic theres about a half inch of sand from one side of the driveway to the other, (I kept the garage door down while blasting to keep the sand from getting everywhere inside).

I use regular play sand from Lowes $3.50 per 50# Bag , then pour it through a strainer to get out pieces that would get stuck in the sandblaster hose/nozzle.

After blasting the piece the good news about the cheap sand is that it can be re-used, I suck it up with the ShopVac and filter it again, then it's ready to be reblasted...

Eventually it will be blasted into a fine powder (which you can still use) but will need to be replaced if you want to keep the rust/paint coming off quickly.  This is why I use the cheap sand instead of the Glass beads/ blassting media which usually costs $1/#...