Rust removal : any experience out there ? Options

[jsteele22]

So the engine/tranny are out of my car and I cleaned the engine bay out reasonably well. Very little rust in general, but of course the RH hell hole was pretty funky. And the battery tray was half gone, so I removed the tray and the support.

Today I attacked it with a wire brush wheel in a power drill. I found that the flaked paint (if any) came off pretty fast, then a layer of light brown dry powdery rust also came off reasonably fast. After that, I seemed to get to a layer of "lumpy" kooking metal that would take on a burnished look, but the color was more of a dark grey than the shiny silver I expected. If I brushed where there had been no rust, I did find shiny silver.

So what I want to know is : how far should I go ? It feels like I'm gonna have to remove a lot of material (and spend forever doing it) if I try to procede w/ the wire brush. I don't have air tools, so blasting would take a lot of effort to set up, and I'm sure it's a big mess. Is media blasting the only way to procede ?

OTOH, if I get all the metal down to that lumpy, dark grey, burnished state, will one of those rust converter products be good enough ? There realy isn't that large an area affected, and so far it doesn't look like there are any "rust throughs" or structural issues.

Sorry, no pics yet. Car at home, camera & computer at office, not organized enough, etc. I'll see if I can get a well-lit pic in the next day or so.