Vespa PX Steering column, stripping and painting

Today I stripped as much paint off the steering column as I could and started painting it.

Started off with the grinding the gates smooth

After a ton of grinding with a nylon disk and wire wheel, this is the end result

Unfortunately, there are some spots I just can't get to. I think my best strategy here would be to get some rust treatment chemicals and brush them into spots like this, and then just paint over it.

Here we can see how this part was molded over the steering column metal pipe. Cleaned up pretty nicely.

My end goal is the clean off the rust, and keep the rust from reappearing. I figure I'm going to have to paint the top and bottom of the steering column separately no matter what, so now that I've got the paint stripped, I'll go right into painting the top half of the column. I'm going to wait on the bottom half, because I would like to remove the steering arm bearings, and that is going to take some work yet.

First things first, degreaser to clean the part of the steering column I want to paint.

The mask off the top and the bottom where the factory had not painted the shaft.

As I was looking at these pictures with my girlfriend, I realize why my back hurts after working all day. I need to buy or make a taller workbench because no matter what I do I'm bending over. It's not like I'm tall or anything.

Primed

and painted. This is just plain "wheel silver" out of a spray can.