grinding on the dash

Cleaning up the inside has been a long slow grind, literally - it's now almost three months since I started sanding of surface rust around the perimeter of the roof. The area behind and under the dash was always destined to be the most complicated - all those small edges - and so it proved. This area was covered in surface rust, and I'm not even sure if it was ever properly painted. Here are some "before" pictures:

I was concerned about throwing grinding dust all over my new primer in the back of the car, so I taped off the rear section as best I could - not perfect but better than nothing.

I started wire wheeling at the passenger side. Apart from the inherent danger of grinding in such closed quarters, there are also a ton of places where the wheel just will not fit.

Here's the view looking towards the driver's side after the first grinding session:

And looking back towards the inside of the dash...plenty more work to do here!

At this point in the proceedings I had already turned the car around and pulled out the engine, so it made sense to remove the steering column and clutch pedal support in order to get better access to the dash on the driver's side.

This was as far as I could get under the driver side dash with the big wire wheel:

Switching over to the drill and die grinder provided better access to some of the tighter corners:

The cowl area in this car - a notorious area for serious rust issues in the Mustang - is in absolutely fantastic shape. A little bit of surface rust was all I had to remove from the underside.

At the end of the second marathon grinding session I had most of the area under the dash cleaned up.

Then it was onto the outer side. I mainly used the drill for this area, as it runs at a lower speed and although that means it takes more effort to remove the paint, there is a much lower risk of damaging the sheet metal by catching an edge with the wire wheel - this area is going to be seen after all. This part of the project was also much easier because I didn't have to contort my body while I was working. I started at the front and worked upwards.

And then moved on to the top of the dash - having the windshield out of the way was an enormous advantage.

Pretty much done in terms of the first pass, and ready to move on to cleaning up the foot wells before I give the entire area a coat of epoxy primer.