so I got a bunch of old Macbooks lying around; they can be had in the $20 region locally in varied states of decay. fixing them up is cheap and easy, so it’s an inexpensive hobby with potential resale upsides. so it occured to me it’d be fun if I could paint them; cheaply of course, can’t outsource this to professionals.
tried searching for successful projects but came up short. I believe the main hurdles were:
- expensive devices, nobody wants to risk fucking them up - not an issue any more
- you kinda hafta disassemble them as paint can fuck up a bunch of stuff - not a problem for me
- something about aluminium not taking regular spraycans and such - might be misremembering this
this is kinda what I had in mind:
you got any pointers on what and how?
Want to reinforce how much painting aluminum sucks. You’ll at the very least want to do some sort of chemical treatment to the surface if you want it to turn out well, it’s the worst.
Electroplating is a lot more work, but not as hard as you’re thinking, might be something to at least watch a quick youtube video on.
I think pretty much every coating that you may add will wear down pretty quickly when it touches abrasive surfaces, is bumped against a table etc. Maybe you could try with a foil that’s used to wrap cars or just adding stickers to it.
yeah the foil thing is a usual go-to in them affairs; don’t consider it as it’s hella expensive and I seriously doubt I haz the skillz to pull this off - just imagine trying to cut out the keyholes and fitting them so they cover everything and it’s taut and adhered everywhere…
I can see that challenge with the key holes. You could also check if anodizing the aluminium might be a viable DIY solution. I never did that myself, but it looks pretty nice and I’d expect it to be more durable than any form of paint.
Yeah this is probably the best answer. There is aluminum specific paint but that is for exterior siding/roofing that may not have constant contact with rubbing surfaces.
contact paper (for cupboards) are fairly inexpensive to practice with coverings…
Instead of painting, you could try etching.
I don’t have any particular acid or lye in mind, as I never tried it, but that might be a good option.
I know it works for steel and some other metals like bronze, tin or copper, so maybe it also works for aluminium too?
