Anodizing Question

[Quick99]

All my red anodized stuff on my boat has faded. My question is can you have it reanodized maybe a different color for a reasonable price or is it cheaper to replace it?

 

[RiverDave]

All my red anodized stuff on my boat has faded. My question is can you have it reanodized maybe a different color for a reasonable price or is it cheaper to replace it?

Easy to re-annodize.. It's a bit time consuming, but it's not overly expensive. (Cheaper then replacing)

Oven cleaner will remove annodizing, and there are some other good products out there as well.

After that, repolish & Annodize. Rex or Dana can handle it for you.

Red is the quickest fading of all the colors.. The die doesn't hold up to UV as well as the others.

Another option would be to just powder coat everything right over the top of your existing anno.

Is there any "engraving" on the anno parts? I.E. "Lights" out of raw metal, and everything else is red? If so you're gonna lose that contrast.

RD

 

[Quick99]

Powder coating was my next question. I really want to get away from the red and go with a gunmetal grey color. Do you have to strip it to powdercoat it? Thanks for the reply. Mike

 

[Quick99]

OK I reread your post and you can powdercoat right over the anodize. Thanks

 

[Tremor Therapy]

Because powder coating requires a static charge, I would think you might need to strip the anodize. I do not know about the surface properties once the anodizing fails, but no anodize holds up to UV very well.

We used to powdercoat parts all of the time, and aluminum parts were always chem filmed or at the very least etched and cleaned prior to powder. Sand blasting to clean white metal always works as well.

 

[RiverDave]

Because powder coating requires a static charge, I would think you might need to strip the anodize. I do not know about the surface properties once the anodizing fails, but no anodize holds up to UV very well.

We used to powdercoat parts all of the time, and aluminum parts were always chem filmed or at the very least etched and cleaned prior to powder. Sand blasting to clean white metal always works as well.

Most (higher end) marine parts are clear anno'd and then powdercoated to prevent corrosion.

Not sure about the static charge dealio.. I never thought about it before to be honest.

RD

 

[RiverDave]

Powder coating was my next question. I really want to get away from the red and go with a gunmetal grey color. Do you have to strip it to powdercoat it? Thanks for the reply. Mike

If it was my boat.. I'd take everything off, send it over to either Dana or Rex, and tell them you want it annodized pewter. Rex's pewter is a lot darker then Dana's. If you goto Dana, tell them you want a darker pewter.. (If your going for a darker grey color)

The DCB pewter is more of a silver color, and similar to Dana's. Schiada pewter is darker in color and actually has a kind of blue tint to it. That's more like Rex Marine's.

I can probably dig up pictures of both if you want to see the difference.

The upside of grey's is even if the shades don't match exactly it still looks bad ass.

RD

 

[Quick99]

Thanks Dave, sure I would like to see some pics. Thanks.

 

[Faceaz]

Just went through this, last year. No expert, but here's what I learned.

I went with Powdercoat because it holds up really well to UV. Anodizing is a bit more resistant to scratches, it actually somehow fuses into the metal, but fades much quicker. Powdercoat is basically a plastic, heated till it melts onto the parts.

Powdercoat is thick, so plan on sanding any parts with tolerances (insides of bezels for example). Powdercoats have varying transparency. The stuff that looks really good is actually pretty transparent. The powdercoater will strip the part, then polish it. The polished aluminum shows through the powdercoat & gives it a real deep luster. It's called a 3 stage (polish + two coats). Had a couple parts done single stage, which is just strip then application of a non-transparent coat. It looks like crap in comparison, I had them re-done.

Good Luck.