Having just gone through this process I think I will tell you what I did. First to do was the frame, being cheap and knowing I could do this myself I bought one of the pressure sandblaster from harbor freight. Cost 70.00 then I had to buy the sand which is aluminum oxide. cost about 50.00 for 100lbs. For this I hung plastic in my garage and sealed everything off as best I could. When doing this you have to wear the proper safety gear, I used a full face respirator and coveralls with a hood. It still took a couple of days and a lot of sweat. You then have to get primer and paint on it asap or it will start to rust everywhere you touch it. Wear gloves when handling blasted metal.
Next I had all of my doors, fenders, hood, front valance media blasted with plastic media. This is what they use where I work. It took another guy and myself about 3 hours to get this done. This removes the paint but not the rust it is also not near as agressive on the metal and does not remove the original phosphate coating. so before you paint you still need to sand or grind all of the rusted spots. Of course if you have bad rust spots like holes you will need to cut them out and weld in new metal. I paid this guy 60.00 for helping me
Then I had to do the cab. Having not learned my lesson from the frame and I wanted to get my moneys worth out of my blaster I bought I decided to blast this myself. I took this to my dads house and did this under his carport. Much better than the garage but still messy to use. If you want to know what this is like go to the beach, and then throw sand all over your body except when you are blasting it has all of the old paint and rust mixed in with it. Good times :mad:. I would not repeat would not do this again.
So when it came time to do the bed I found a place called MarionAG it's by Auroura OR. that did sandblasting. I called them up he said it would take a couple of hours @ 90.00 an hour. this is for top and bottom of the bed. I took it to them and had it done and it only took 1 1/2 hours and cost 135.00 I did not have any issues with warpping of the panels. But of course my bed was pretty beat up.
So with all of this hindsight and if I had it to do all over I would be a cheap skate and take it to somebody and have it sandblasted. It cost about the same and with none of the work involved. Just my two cents