Neil-
Just going to throw in my $.02 worth in here also-
The '67 C-10 my daughter and I restored was in fairly good shape when we started, therefore I did not make a trip to the sandblaster.
As the project moved along, I really wished I had.
GM didn't waste a lot of money painting their trucks. This was really troublesome under the dash and in the cab.
Long story short - we ended up taking the truck completely apart anyway. It would not have been very expensive or time consuming to take the parts to the sandblaster and have everything cleaned up down to bare metal. Once that was done I could have shot primer on at home to keep anything from starting to rust again.
If you will notice on most of the TV shows, they almost always head for the blaster as soon as they get the vehicle disassembled. I know most of us don't have a TV show budget to work with, but
like I said, sandblasting really isn't that expensive. These old trucks are really pretty simple to work on, but you can run in to a ton of aggravation dealing with 40-50 years of accumulated rust and crud.
To me - having a nice clean primered vehicle to start off with is much better than fighting several decades of Mother Nature.
Don't know if this will help you decide anything or not - just wanted to share some personal experience.
Good Luck!
