Mm, lets make it easy for me! Just visit Mercedes-Benz Ponton Page and you'll get answers to all your questions!
Yes, why did I do this? The car was actually in a rather good shape. As you can see from the "pre restoration" pictures it looks quit good and I wasn't unhappy with the exterior so to speak. What annoyed me was that I every second week had to change a sealing, a bearing, change an electrical wiring, adjust that, repair this...
The car has over 300.000km behind it and I thought it was time to do something. And yes, it very soon went in the wrong (?) direction. I found myself taking the car down to the smallest particle. I don't regret it and I would do it again.
The goal of the restoration is to get the car back to original shape, not better. I will re-use everything that is re-usable and replace only the things that has to be replaced, for example rubber, sealings, bearings and the electrical wiring.
The chassis and most of the other parts are not blasted but hand grinded. In my opinion you have a better control of the cleaning and - above all - the car will not bleed sand for the rest of its life. It will of course take much longer time. I suppose you can imagine the time I've spent cleaning all corners of the chassis, behind girders, in tubes and so forth. I estimate that I've spent something like six to eight weeks (8-10 hours shifts) on the chassis alone!
Due to the variables time and money I suppose that a lot of things will be left to improve during the first years on the road. The quality of the restoration of the individual parts has the highest priority, even though it'll mean that the car is not 100% perfect the first time it rolls out of the garage. I'll fix the small details when the variables let me, for example restoration of chrome and stuff like that.
The following items were not installed when my father bought the car, but I do think they will make our vacations nicer: