So I purchased a new Harbor Freight trailer a few weeks ago. My goal is to paint it a slightly different red because it's going to better match a sticker that I've already ordered to put on my teardrop when it's done.
I'm familiar with primer and wet sanding, etc and by "familiar" I mean I've heard of it LOL. Never done it before but that's what's great about the internet.
However for some reason I had it in my mind that it would be okay to paint the new color of red that I want directly over the brand new red rails as I pulled them out of the box. I'm feeling like this is now bass-ackwards but I spent many hours carefully painting the new rails without any primer.
I finally started putting the trailer together last night and noticed that if my fingernails scratched one of the rails the paint was peeling right off. Ugh. I'm now feeling like I should have applied primer even over the new rails first before painting them the new red.
I'm out of town for the week but last night before the weekend ended I took one of the offending rails and used my orbital sander to sand off all of the new paint that I put on. I continued sanding to get rid of the old paint (or original new paint to be more accurate) until I took the shine off. I was careful not to go to bare metal. I then sprayed the rail with primer.
My question is, is this the right way to do it? This is only the trailer frame and I'm not trying to paint a Lamborghini so I don't need it perfect but I definitely don't want paint flaking off after a couple of seasons. Do I need to wet sand the primer painted rail before I put the new red paint on or can I just now apply the red paint directly? Out of the 15 or so rails only 4 of them exhibited flaking paint. The others seemed fine but I'm a bit worried that if I don't sand them down and then prime them, that they will start having problems down the road? Or if the paint job looks good now does that mean it should stay good?
And now I have another thing to worry about. Someone told me that once you prime a piece of metal that you should put the paint over the top of it fairly soon. Like within a couple of days? I primed it yesterday/Sunday and I won't be able to get back to it until Friday. 5 days later. Will it still be okay to put the red paint over the primer after 5 days? What does oxidization of primer painted metal look like?
Thanks for all your thoughts!