Fuselage Paint Prep

Today was spent prepping the fuselage for paint and choosing a color. I made 5 test pieces using various shade of grey. I continue to lean towards using Rustoleum vs spraying it on with a gun. Many on the forums are advocates too. The quality of my test pieces using Rustoleum aluminum primer with a color top coat rivals anything I've seen sprayed on with a paint gun. I'm convinced surface prep and a good primer are key. Most of the greys I tried ended up too dark or the wrong tint for my taste. I ended up with 2 that looked good to me ( and more importantly, my wife) and went with the lighter one. Reason being to minimize cockpit heating. Then I spent hours vacuuming dirt, using compressed air to blow dirt from the crevises, meticulously scuffing the metal with a Scotchbright pad, then cleaning with acetone and finally 92% isopropyl alcohol. The areas that came previously primed needed extra attention since that primer was incorrectly applied by Van's. I found alcohol easily removed most of it. I wiped off as much as I could to give the the fresh primer a better grip on the metal. Then I started masking which is slow going. I'm not going to paint the stainless steel firewall so it all needs to be masked off which will mean crawling into the fuselage tomorrow on my belly to do that. Not looking forward to that.