4 days, and as many big containers of serious duty paint stripper; these are the ingredients that spell exhaustion and asphyxiation in a single breath. I seem to recall going through several packs of sandpaper in these days, course, medium, and finer. I had discovered a trick when stripping the paint off the rear door back in school, and had pillaged about 20' of tin foil from the cafeteria in the middle of the night to seal up the gel-based paint stripper. Covering the gel helps trap it against the paint, and does not let it evapourate. The beauty of this is it has lots of time to work on the paint and doesnt stop until it hits bare steel.
This step of the restoration is where I finally discovered how much Bondo work had been done in the past, which happened to be quite an astounding amount. There is no panel on the truck that does not have Bondo on it, making up for ripples, sags, dents and puckers. Luckily for me the paint stripper didnt touch the old Bondo, so I was able to salvage a lot of the labour that someone else did that was frankly, sometimes better than my own.
Peeling off a layer of tin foil and having the old paint come with it is extremely cathartic... though not as much as running the sharp blade of a steel scraper underneath the paint and wtching it peel off in a big sheet. In lots of areas the paint practically offered to leap off the truck on its own, and in some places it held with the tenacity of a petrified freestyle climber.
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