Great to hear your getting to it now! Instead of letting it sit and get worse on you.
BUT, I am surprised that sandblasting did not remove ALL the rust. Did you just use a small sandblaster on this?
I had the cab, tailgate, bedsides, and other parts blasted, and they came back like a fresh piece of metal with 0 rust on it. On the pits that are like yours, I just skim coated them with
bondo, sanded and epoxy primed.
I did have these professional blasted, so maybe that was the difference. Plus I believe the guy used walnut shells. I let my tailgate sit a good 3-4 months before getting to it, and the walnut shells process left a protected coating. The gate was not even rusting after letting it sit in my shop after the 3-4 months.
Ya, I used a small pressure tank, and my actual
CMF is quite low even though I'm running 3 compressors in tandem. Against everyone's advice I used sylica beach sand, it was out side and I used a respirator and didn't seam to have any trouble. The tank blaster did a good job, and you cant see any real rust by just looking at it. But if you get up super close and look in the recesses of the pitting there are still traces of rust. I know there is alot of controversy on phosphoric acid based products, but as long as you don't paint the **** on over and over again, make sure to wipe off the excess and stay away from etching primers I think it works fine. The catastrophic failure testimonials come from those unfortunate painters that have used etching primers on top of a phosphoric acid treatment I'm sure. I'm using these products for two reasons. I'm in Washington State, working in an unheated garage and flash rust is definitely a problem. And, the amount of pitting on the tins makes me extremely nervous of rust popping up after shooting the paint. The tins are just tapped out and patch welded at the moment, prior to any mudding Ill be scuffing these puppies up good................
