The Mariah Owners Club - Aluminum priming painting

One of the projects I have been working on had to do with painting aluminum. It was a frame to the door that goes into the cuddy. The frame currently had paint but it was peeling off and the previous owner attempted one of those " re-paint without any prep work" quick fixes. The frame itself is a bad design because it pools water in areas and caused corrosion behind a piano hinge and latches. The corrosion was so bad I could not get the screws holding the hinge out. Drilling, prying and cursing ensued. After I had it stripped of hardware I was going to just sand the paint of but that is a lot of work. So I used paint stripper I found at walmart in an aerosol can. It really burns this skin so you know that it works good!!! Stripper left the frame raw aluminum. Gave me a fresh start and allowed me to sand and dremel the corrosion off the frame.
When the aluminum was ready to paint I figured I just use some Rustoleum I had in the garage. The color even matched perfect. I painted a small area of it to see how it would dry. The answer... Not good. It was bubbled and did not want to stick to aluminum. (I have been a painter for 12 years and never had this problem!) After some research and phone calls I found out I needed to use an epoxy primer to get the aluminum ready for paint. I dont have a cup gun so mixing a two part epoxy for spray was out of the question. I found a really cool product, SprayMax 2k. It comes in a can so no cup gun needed. You just activate it by pushing in a plug on the bottom. It sprays really nice too. After the primer is dry you can paint whatever you want over it. I finished it with a really hard and glossy paint. It came out good, looks new. I caulked behind the piano hinge to keep water from collecting there.

The primer----- 2K Epoxy Primer Filler: Spraymax

The best price I found was off of Amazon. ---- Amazon.com: USC 2K Spray Max Epoxy Primer Paint Aerosol: Automotive