Just a few moments ago I was talking to a guy who runs a private gun shop here in Croatia. I told him I'll have a piece of aluminium 7075 about 35 cm long with stains from a screwed up anodization proccess that I would like to cerakote, and I wanted to know what does he think will this work out (so far he was only doing guns in his cerkatoe oven).
He said, yeah, absolutely, just bring it here, no problems.
Now... when it comes to masking. Total thickness of one layer of cerakote can vary anywhere between 0.0125 mm - 0.0255 mm.
My conclusion is this is well within switch plate tolerances and I won't be doing any masking whatsoever because it would not have any real benefit, everything should be perfectly fine just just the way it is.
If anybody is having any experience with cerakoting and thinks my decision is wrong, please warn me before it's too late.
Hm, now when I looked more deeply into the matter, things seem quite a bit more complicated than I thought at first.
It turns out, if I want to do cerakote properly, I need to remove anodising layer first. And that's a requirement to ensure proper adhering to the aluminium surface.
Now, proper way to remove surface layer is sandblasting. Cerakote is expensive, somewhere in the ballpark of $100 per keyboard, but this makes it even more expensive, although I still haven't checked how much, I guess somewhere around $50.
What I wonder though is - can I maybe remove it manually to save some cost? Like, you know, take a fine water sanding paper and do it by hand?
This definately looks doable to me, but the real question is - how thick in practical therms is the cerakote layer. Because if it's very thin, you will see scuffs from hand-sanding through the cerakote paint.