Front beam - more cleaning and head scratching

I dropped little dude off at school this morning and hit up the Harbor Freight a few miles away for some wire wheels.  Once I made it back home, I got back to cleaning the beam and made real good progress until I got to the cracks/crevices - there are quite a few places that cannot be reached with a 4" wire wheel.

Today's goal was to get the front beam completely clean and ready for paint tomorrow.  Getting this beam clean was a hell of a lot more complicated than I anticipated.  I've also come to accept that this thing isn't getting painted until next week - partially because of how long this is taking and partially due to weather.  It's either paint tomorrow or wait until next week...tomorrow's not looking good.

I straightened out the giant dent in the bottom seam weld and tried to retain what I'll call grease drains on the bottom seam.  One turned out pretty good - the other one, not so great but better than it was (smashed flat).

After trying (and destroying) a handful of Dremel wire wheels, I found the magic combination of tools to get 99% of the paint off of the beam.  I am mostly happy with the current state of the beam.

I returned the POR 15 that I bought yesterday and decided to try my hand at 2k paint (had to order it).  I was seriously thinking about dropping the torsion arms off for powder coat but they're 4 weeks out on work right now and I'm kind of hoping that I can have this back together and functional in 1/2 that time.  Even if I did go for that - I'd still have to do something with the beam and the pan head...so not much of an overall gain.

Getting all of the little corners and folds was a challenge.

If I look REALLY close I can find a few areas that I missed but I think it looks pretty good.  I'll need to get a couple more wire wheels to finish it off if I want to get super anal about it.

Not bad for a guy who usually doesn't have the patience to do shit like this...

I'm going to coat it in Ospho tomorrow and let it sit for a little bit.  I imagine the paint will show up next week - I've got a bit of other work to do while I wait.

I have the torsion arms to clean up, the frame head needs to be checked and the one mount bracket needs to be straightened up.  I'll also order up some new hardware to replace the super rusty/damaged stuff I've taken off.  If everything goes well, I might tack on cleaning/painting the frame head - which would mean pulling the front brake lines.  Not the end of the world - I did a pretty shit job of bending the brake lines and they're relatively inexpensive.  Once I get going, it's hard to just stop and accept the condition of things.  The rainy weather means that I wouldn't be driving the car right now so I may as well do as much as possible to improve it while I have the time.

So, hopefully tomorrow I can file down the sharp bits, apply some Ospho and get started on another improvement aspect of this build.  I do still need to figure out how I want to install that fuel line from the pan to the tank (with or without an adapter) and how/if I want to start on cleaning up the pan head...then I can paint everything at once.

Many rabbit holes, not enough time...