Ok, all kidding aside, please don't paint your mast. Painting on aluminum is non-trivial. You're just inviting later headaches, because if the preparation and paint job are not done perfectly, it either peels soon after or worse yet, you get bubbles which eventually trap water up against your mast. Bad news all around. The prep work is basically clean/sand/scrub/clean again till the mast is shiny, then prime it with a self-etching primer, then spray on two coats. But, if you're going to clean it up to the point of being shiny, why bother painting? Just go with your new shiny mast, and cover it with an aluminum clearcoat preservative.
To make a long story short, that was my thought process when I reached the point of total disgust with my own scratched up, blotchy, hadn't been cleaned in 20 years mast:
- Old Mast
- DirtyMast.jpg (242.85 KiB) Viewed 3531 times
Not the best photo to show the oxidation and scars, but best I have. How bad is your mast? Anyway, here's a before/after from when I was working on it:
- Before/After
- Contrast.jpg (239.25 KiB) Viewed 3531 times
The before part is above the spreaders (closer to camera) and is already after the initial cleaning, but still you can see the difference. After all done:
- After
- After2.jpg (151.74 KiB) Viewed 3531 times
Two years later, mast still looks good. Not quite as shiny, but I can always buff it again. If this works for you, let me know and I'll try and write out some instructions on exactly what I did and what magic glop I put on the mast to preserve. Basically I did some light hand sanding with a fine grit paper on the really bad spots, otherwise it was just a lot of cleaning with one of those two-sided scrub sponges and TSP. Lastly put on the magic glop, let it dry, hand-buffed with a cloth, done. I'll need to dig thru my paint locker to find what I used, but really anything from the auto-store that you'd use to preserve aluminum wheels will do.
For what it's worth, first time I went sailing again with my mast all nice and shiny, I proudly pointed it out to my regular crew. His reaction: "Oh? And the boat sails so much faster now?"