Lady Bug was a serendipidous find a few years back and it was brought into reVOLKS for a quick peak directly after it was rescued from it's previously barn-sheltered life in the Ozarks near our shop.
Back then it had been basically "driven into the barn and parked" where this lucky owner spotted it and made the deal. During it's first visit to our shop we reviewed it's over-all health and did some basic maintenance including some replacement window seals to stop water from entering the cabin now that it lived outside in "the real world". Also the headliner was replaced since it was torn and falling out in a few places. Other than this, we advised the owner to "Drive this car!" and without hesitation she did :) Almost daily too!

However, time and use began to get the better of it and last year the owner decided to have it restored. She wanted to rid it of the "recent" (we're talking decades ago) paint job that appeared to have been applied with a roller-brush :( and to freshen-up the engine that was starting to get a bit more selective as to it's operational hours.

So, our job directive was:
Make it look and run like it did almost 40 years ago!
So we got on the job...

As you can see, in these two pics, the body looks pretty good even if the paint was applied with a roller-brush. However, years of country living in the Ozarks had accumulated a fair amount of road tar and "pea gravel" that was stuck to all inner fender surfaces and lower sections so we decided the body would be in need of a little media blasting. This would be to include all four fenders since they weighed nearly twice the original weight due to tar and stones well fixed to their inner surfaces.
We chose to have only the "lower" 1/3 of the body media blasted as the body was clean above this. The "roll-on" paint sanded off quite easily revealing the stock-original paint below which was still very stable but upon closer inspection of the lower 1/3 we saw signs...

The front and rear aprons also suffered from some damage from most likely parking lot "Oooops!" given that they both had cracks in the panel edges and the associated rusting caused by insufficient preparation before body work was previously performed to these spots.
In case you ever think you want to use lots of body filler on the rear apron to fix a dent or worse crack - DON'T. It just won't last there. The rear apron is subjected to all the engine heat and even worse all the exhaust heat and heat is body filler's worst nightmare. Unless you are prepared to work molten lead as a body filler that is. So dents in the rear apron must be fixed properly by removing them not by covering them up with polymer-based body fillers.

The rest that is visible now are typical signs of what may be further discovered after media blasting is completed and in some ways was actually reassuring as we knew for certain that the best course of action was to media blast only the lower 1/3 to cleans the body of any unseen rusting and save the rest from the mess.
So off it went to be media blasted.

The rear tail light housings, called "Tomb-stone" tail lights due to their shape were media blasted along with their fenders because the securing fasteners were essentially glued to the fenders with road tar and stones. This allowed these light housings to be easily removed later and left only minor spotting on the fenders where their rubber seals covered the rear fenders.
The rear fenders had some relatively minor dents which show some old body filler still attached after media blasting. The reason why the old body filler was not blasted off is simple:
We request that our media blaster STOP when he finds any body filler build-up and skip over that space if it's on an "open" panel. Why? You ask. Well, the media blasting will tend to heat-up the panel when it's focused for extended periods of time on the same spot. The result can often be worse warping to the panel (from media blasting heat build-up) than what the body filler may be covering. So the bondo stayed even though the rest of the panel was blasted clean.
In the last three quarter panel pictures we can see the extent of the previously visible rusting was more than met the eye through the paint and after returning from media blasting we were able to see clearly just how much.
The good news is that the areas of concern before remained the only areas of concern afterwards. There was some minor skin perforation from rusting in the two front quarters but these were easy to repair and were expected based upon what we knew beforehand. The back quarters would be more involved but only because of their locations at the aft-end of the heater channels. These are just difficult spaces to work in and are comprised of complex angles so sectional replacement work and welding would not be easy.
Also seen here is the road wheels were also media blasted. This is our normal process since the wheels are almost always nasty with rusting either behind or on their face and just plain difficult to get rid of with such tight seams.

In the third-last over-all picture you can notice if you look closely that the doors were not on the car during media blasting. Why is that?
Well, the not so obvious answer is because we removed the doors prior to media blasting and masked-off the openings with plywood. This is done for a few reasons. The first is you must remove all the glass from the doors so it doesn't get "etched" by flying media and also because I wanted all the doors to be "jammed" but not the doors open fields across the middle. Why? The doors have relativey thin metal skins and are easily warped during media blasting and this would lead to even more body working but still the door jams were very crusty with minor surface rusting along the window openings and around the door seal areas. Thus, it's easier and better to let the media blaster work the edges only to clean-up the hard-to-reach areas.
If you look closely at the door just in front and beyond the nose of the car you will see it is still white through it's middle panel but all around has been media blasted. Simple and effective :)
The last two pictures show the body being cleaned of the media blasting debris that seems to get into every nook-n-cranny on the car. Compressed air works wonders to get all the "goo" out of the car. Hey! Is that what they mean by "air cooled"? :)
Finally, the engine bay was cleaned-out. The old insulation was deteriorated and falling apart and was to be replaced anyway. Good time to check-out all the wire loom that runs inside the engine bay too.