Well, I was rebuilding my doors (stays, lube, door handle gasket, etc.) and found out my driver's side interior door handle is half broken (see my WTB in classifieds if you have one handy!)

So, since I am waiting to get a handle, I decided to pull my rocker and clean out the dirt.

Not so bad compared to many - maybe a half a cup of dirt. Some of it obviously painted over in 1997 - nice.

Anyways, after cleaning it up.. it doesn't seem to be in cut-off-and-replace state.. but what should I do to it before buttoning it back up? Wire wheel and some rattlecan?

I'm telling myself if I have the car in 10 years, I'll spring for a full strip & repaint, but until then, it's "maintenance mode."

Click to view attachment

A couple of those spots AROUND the jackpost look soft to me. If you aren't ready to commit to some serious time off the road, I wouldn't go poking too hard with anything sharp and pointy in that area. This is how unsuspecting guys end up jumping off into a full-blown resto.

I just went through this a week ago except about 2 lbs of dirt came out of each side. Mine looked just a little worse than yours until - I poked a small screw driver into one of the rusty areas under the receiver. After wiggling it around I found out, and hopefully you won't - that the area under the receiver rusted from the inside out from one side to the other about an inch under the jack port. I decided to clean the area up and see if the rust had significantly damaged the longitudinals (yes on both sides). I used an angle grinder to cut out the damaged area below the jack port. I discovered that the rust was 1/16th to 1/8th of an inch into the outer longs. I ground it off, and used a wire wheel to clean it up. I used Rust-Mort to kill the rust and then used POR 15 to treat any remaining residue and seal the area. Some day I might get around to doing a complete restoration but for the time being the rust is dead.

I am glad I dug deeper and found out how bad/not bad the rust really was and had a chance to clean it up before it got worse and created a structural problem. You may want to do the same before it can possibly get worse.

Best of luck.

P.S. Every year I will remove the screws under the rockers and make sure it is free of all dirt.