Hey Painters..., Q regarding wash primers. Options

[Rusty]

It's been so long since I've held a paint gun... I need some refreshing.

I know that ideally, wash-primer and primer-surfacer should be from the same paint system. Is that a hard and fast rule?

I want to lay down a PPG wash-primer (1791 primer/1792 catylist) on bare metal and later coat it with an (unknown yet) brand of primer surfacer. My (often faulty) memory seems to tell me that wash-primer is pretty generic.

Is there a signficant chance of bubbling or other incompatibility?

-Rusty (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/smoke.gif)

[IronHillRestorations]

For bare metal I use DuPont Vari-Prime, but it's expensive.

If you don't want to sand it later, you can use the DuPont non sanding primer, and then paint it right away. This works good for engine compartments, inside the trunks, etc, where you don't want to have to go back and sand all of that for proper adhesion. You do need a good block of uninterupted time though. To prime twice, and paint it'll take you at least six hours, by the time you mix your paints, clean your gun, etc.

If it's going to be sanded and blocked, I use the Vari-Prime and than paint it with the DuPont URO high build primer.

I use the DuPont line because that's what's available locally.

I would recommend using the entire system you can get locally. That is, use all PPG, DuPont, Lesonal, Sikkens, whatever, just stick with the same brand from bare metal up. You'll have less potential for problems that way.