I’m about ready to paint my 82 Collector Edition.   Forgive the length of the background but you need to know that so you guys can give me the quality advice you have always provided.  

It will be a daily driver.   I’m 66 and do not intend on doing much of the work myself.  I have a guy I pay $10 an hour to work for me when I’m doing things I need help on or just do not want to do. 

I backed the car into a low post at church hurt my feeling more than it did the car but what it did show me is the paint at least on the bumper is no longer bonded good.  It came off in flakes some as big as potato chips.  The rest of the body seems to have the paint bonded good. 

The few chips I have tell me that the car has two maybe three coats of paint on it.  I have few if any stress cracks I do have a bubble where a rivet in the front rusted and the glass will have to be drilled away so that can be fixed and then patched.  

I have a person (life time member here) “vettsteve” that runs a C3 restoration and parts business that I’m going to employ to complete the patch work that is required.   I will have his paint shop do the work as he is a regular customer and therefore has more pull with them than a one timer would.  Steve will take all of the weather stripping off hardware and other removable items off of the car then hall it over to the paint shop.  I will talk about weather stripping in a different thread.

Enough on the prelude Stuff now down to specifics:  
* What are the recommendations on stripping or just sanding the car?.  
* If stripping, what kind of stripping options are recommended for an 82?  Chemicals, blasting (with what), razor blade or just sanding.   I saw a video of a guy using a pressure washer once is that an option?.  I realize from researching threads that the recommendation could be different depending on gel coated cars and non-gel coated cars.
* What are the pitfalls if I just have it block sanded in prep for painting except on the bumpers?

To be honest, I would ask the paint guys what they would feel best with. They're the ones that will be squirting the paint, and having to deal with any issues after that.
Opinions will be all over the place for the best method to remove the paint. I personally prefer sanding, tho it takes forever. For me, I stand less chance of screwing something up that way.

If the paint has damage, such as you described, just block-sanding will not give you a good paint job in return. Macco, and Earl Sheib paint shops do them that way. It'll look good for a while, but then you'll wish you had gone a different route.

You also have the decals to deal with....that's a whole nuther problem...

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Joel Adams
C3VR Lifetime Member #56    
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"Money can't buy happiness -- but somehow it's more comforting to cry in a CORVETTE than in a Kia"

Because it will be a daily driver I'm not doing the decals.  Steve's paint shop has painted three CE's and the last two have had a real nice faders painted on. Smooth clean fades.   The first one was good at 20 feet the others were real nice.  If you looked hard you could see where it was not a smooth fade.  But even so it was good looking and much better than the $1300 plus for  the decals if you can find them.