The body will take longer than I expected to get ready for painting. I had given it a first coat of primer last fall, and over last weekend I block-sanded most of the open areas. That revealed a bunch of high and low spots that will need an additional coat of primer. I also discovered a couple of small dents that I hadn’t noticed in three years of working on the body, which needed a bit of feather-fill to fix them up. Also, there are lots and lots of moldings and other oddly-shaped areas that will need careful, tedious sanding. Ironically, the areas that I had done a bunch of metalworking on (like part of the roof) were OK. It was the areas that I had assumed were fine which had subtle irregularities.
Hopefully by the end of the month I will have all the sanding done, and the body ready to paint.
I also repaired a broken mounting stud on the stainless steel trim strip that goes just behind the hood.