The shell spent over a year outside all covered up before I could work on it. This is what it looked like after it was uncovered and raised up on milkcrates. Yes, it had gotten a bit worse, but the quarters will be replaced anyways and the rest would be sandblasted.
The first thing to be done was to weld some braces across the door openings prior to mounting it on the rotisserie. Without the braces the body would deform on the rotisserie, which would not be noticable until it was time to install the doors.
Attaching the rear of the body to the rotisserie requires special brackets since the rear bumper mounting surface is on a sloped surface. Luckily the guy who had the car before me had some special brackets made to attach it to his rotisserie. I found the brackets in the car while I was cleaning it out.
Once on the rotisserie the quarters where cut out so that the inside could be sandblasted thoroughly. This also exposed the extent that the right rear quarter inner support panel had been cut out. Luckily these panels have recently become available.
The top of the dash was chopped up pretty bad in and around the speaker holes and needed replacing because of it. So I cut out the upper dash panel and removed the rest of the dash since it was only being held in place by a couple spot welds.
The rear seat brace had been hacked into to fit wide tires on the car. Since new ones were available I decided to remove the original one prior to sandblasting.
A guy I've known since kindergarten, Stephen Dexter (Dexter's Products), did the sandblasting for me. This is the first time that I hired someone to do my sandblasting and he did a great job as you can see. At a rate of $125/hr he was able to get the job done for $875. I am very happy with the work he did.
As you can see from the pictures, the car is pretty well cleaned up and ready for the metal work. This will take me some time since there are a ton of repairs to made. For the first time I am not fixing damage due to rust. However, the process is exactly the same.