sand off the cheep paint, but do not go to bare metal, stop when our down to the Merc stuff (it will not be hard to tell),. Even if your unit only has 80% of the Merc paint left your still better off keeping it and working with the bare spots.... If you do what you planned and take it to bare metal "you will be redoing (touching it up) every year from now on"

The other options is to leave it bare aluminum.

I have a plan to paint only the upper in black and the whole transom assembly in black. I am putting on a nose cone and will probably paint the lower silver / aluminum color this way if the skeg drags in the sand at the sandbars where we go in the summer I can easily touch it up.

yes , this is the way I have been doing it for years ..

I used All Metal with a Hydromotive Nose Cone and all was extremely well ! 10yrs or so use.

Couldn't agree more. We just re-did ours. The original plan was to sandblast and were convinced otherwise. Probably for the better. We did a quick rough sand, primer, and phantom black. Results came out amazing. We opted to add a clear coat too. Which was worth the extra paint time.

The other issue with sand blasting assembled is potential damage to inner o-rings. Many people tape off localized o-ring features but you still run the risk of damaging them especially if the tape doesn't hold up to a blaster.

Yep, Hydromotive recommended Allmetal to install their nosecones.