I have a 57 chevy with what appears to be an original painted dashboard. What looked to me like grey primer overspray turned out to be someones lousy attempt at clearcoating resulting in a milky mess. I found this out by trying to claybar the what I thought was overspray and eventually moving on to 1000 wetsanding. The wetsanding produced white chalky sanding dust, obviously clear coat. It took a lot of work at 1000 grit to break thru to the base coat, how much more aggressive should I go with to get down to the base coat with less effort/time? Better methods?. I will NOT be clear coating the paint. Thanks!
Soooo, are you trying to preserve the "original" paint? Or removing the bad clear to completely repaint? If trying to save the paint under the clear, most likely you will remove paint, as well as clear if you sand it. On edges, or high spots, you'll go down to primer, or bare metal, and have to reshoot the color, anyway. It does look like the clear has some good adhesion in a lot of areas. That means problems. If sanding to reshoot it all, you probably should go all the way down to metal. IF that's original paint, it is lacquer, and very thin, and also using modern paints on top of it , is not a good application.
That is along the lines of restoring a vintage Rembrandt. Lots of time picking at small areas to make sure you only remove the bad stuff and don’t go into the good stuff. And as Chop said, the original paint layer will be very thin.
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