I like using high quality Akzo epoxy primer for a variety of reasons. Chief among its advantages is its quick tack cure time. You can prime something and in less than an hour, is dry enough to continue assembly work on. Here's another major advantage, something no rattle can primer can equal....24 or so hours later, after Akzo is fully cured you can wipe it down using strong solvents. I almost always use MEK. The most you will do is lighten up its finish a bit. I have never found
any rattle can primer capable of enduring a periodic wipe down with solvents, most especially MEK. Another thing I like about Akzo is that later on, sometimes
weeks or even
months later, you can touch up an area and its finish will blend in with the original application almost perfectly. Now that might not mean much to most builders but Akzo is THE final finish in my cockpits. Take a closer look at my avatar. That's Akzo on the rear bulkhead. To illustrate the point about touching it up later, I commonly did that very "touch up" thing using a small artist brush dipped in Akzo that was left in the film canister after a priming session. I used it to prime the rivet shop heads and you'd never know those rivets were brush coated by hand and sometimes long after the original spray application.
Using the little touch up primer pistol fitted with a 35mm film canister shown below, I shot the
entire -8 fuselage interior,
all of it including the large skins. Oftentimes during the assembly process though, priming involved only one or a few small parts at a time. No problem. It is quick and simple to mix a small amount of Akzo. Typically, I mix less than 4 oz. at a time. The key is pouring an equal amount of part A and part B into separate small dixie cups, then mixing both parts together in the larger dixie cup, pouring the mix into a 35 mm film canister, finally shooting it through a small primer pistol. That way, waste (and expense) is kept to a bare minimum.
My idea of surface prep is nothing more than lightly roughing the surface with maroon scotchbrite then washing in mild soapy water, rinse and dry. Larger parts were done in the bathtub.
Really large parts were done outside using a bucket of warm soapy water and rinsed with a garden hose. I do not use Alumiprep at all and only use alodine on steel and non-alclad parts. Just prior to applying Akzo, I routinely give the surface a final wipe down with MEK which as you may know evaporates almost immediately. Clean up is about as simple as it gets. You throw the dixie cups away and fill the film canister with MEK, running that through the primer pistol to clear it. All done.