I pulled up the sketchy carpet in the cab of my 58 and the floor has a fair amount of surface rust, but appears solid.
I want to clean the rust off and get some fresh paint on it to keep it from degrading any further. In the past I have always used an angle grinder with a brass wire wheel for bulk rust removal and done the final cleanup with a hand drill and a scotch bright pad. In doing some more reading, it seems like a fair number of body people say that using those will just drive the rust particles deeper into the metal (to emerge later) and that the only good answer is to sandblast it.
How true is that? My long term goal is to have a reasonably nice truck that I can pass down to my kids to use as a truck. It will never be perfect and never be a trailer queen. I would prefer to avoid sandblasting because I am not set up to do that large of a project myself. I can pull the seat and the fuel tank and do the floor in sections. I figure I will pull the body mount bolts one at a time and do the floor in quarters (pull one, prep/paint that area, new bolt, repeat) so that the cab hopefully won't be able to shift while I am working.
At some point the dash will get pulled to fix where someone hacked up the center section, but I would like to prep/paint the floor sooner than that.
