Removing Etch Primer & Surface Rust

The Mini shell was professionally sand-blasted and painted with etch primer, however 12 years later it has formed an unhealthy amount of rust spots through the paint. Surface rust was mainly visible on the exterior body panels and some patches of the interior, whereas places like inside the wheel arches had nothing visible.

Side panel :

Front guard (with patches from other paint after rust repairs) :

The (2K) etch primer needed to be stripped back in the affected areas however I chose the significant task of stripping ALL exterior etch primer down to bare metal and a majority of the interior. To try and contain the dust and paint overspray for this next stage of work I squeezed a cheap 6x3m party tent into my workshop. 

The underbody and exterior panels were stripped using a combination of poly strip discs and wire wheels.

The areas that were harder to access with a drill or grinder (eg subframe areas, wheel arches, boot underfloor, seams) had the etch primer removed with garnet from a pressure sandblasting pot. 

To mitigate the garnet getting outside the tent I lowered the tent height and used some timber lengths to hold down the tent side panels. This worked quite well however it ended up being extremely hard to keep all the really fine dust contained within the tent.

After sweeping up the garnet it was filtered through a sieve to remove any bigger particles that could clog the blasting nozzle as it only has a 2-3mm aperture.

Boot underfloor :

Lower engine bay and wheel wells :

Then the same process of etch primer stripping and blasting was done for the engine bay, boot & interior. 

For cleaning up inside the shell I connected a small cyclone collector (normally attached to my sandblasting cabinet) to the shop-vac to reclaim the garnet into the 5 Litre bucket, rather than the vacuum bag. 

I took the opportunity to also blast the front subframe which had a significant amount of surface rust all over it.

The doors, bonnet & boot lid weren't painted in etch primer however the surface rust was still removed using poly wheels & wire wheels. This paint & surface rust removal and sandblasting work took over 40 hours to complete, however it saved me upwards of AUD$2000 in getting everything blasted again by a third party and the many months of lead time that a few companies quoted me.