paint setup

[Jeremy Marcoe]

Hi guys I am new here. I was referred to this site by a friend who contributes to the site. Just to give a little background
I am from the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. I am a Journeyman Electrician by trade and play a lot of guitar. I decided not to long ago that its time I built my own. So... I have some very good friends who work in the woods for a living and are supplying me with some of their best Ash and Maple. Another friend of mine does the saw work. So it seems to be working out pretty good as far as the materials go. My main question is in setting up a place to spray what I build. How big of a spray booth or room would be adequate to do this, and how big of an exhaust fan is enough to do it? I would imagine there are filters on the outside to catch any overspray going through the exhaust. Any examples that you could point to would be extremely helpful.

Thanks

Jeremy

[george wilson]

Welcome to the Forum,Jeremy. Grizzly sells a few spray booths which you might want to look at. Get their catalog. These are not very cheap. I guess not many of them are made. What you need first is a good exhaust fan with an explosion proof motor. I had a spray booth at work,but don't have the space for 1 in my large-but-too-much-stuff home shop. Therefore,I have to resort to spraying outside. Be sure you keep upwind. I got a kidney infection in the 60's from breathing too much lacquer. Use a proper mask,too.

[Larry Fox]

A low-tech, low-budget way of doing it would be to spray your color coats outside (assuming they are either high VOC or highly flammable) and use a water-based topcoat. For the WB topcoat, I just setup a couple of box fans with disposable furnace filters on the intake side and blow the overspray out the garage door. It aint a spray booth but it is also < $30 all-in and does a serviceable job. I clean the shop top to bottom (including mopping the floor), and let it sit for a day before spraying top coats. This combined with how fast the WB stuff dries keeps down on the dust bitties.

[Don Parker]

I build acoustic guitars. It sounds like you are building an electric (you are using ash and maple). Here are some things to consider:

First, nitrocellulose lacquer is the traditional finish for solid body electric guitars, but it is damn dangerous and unhealthy to apply via spraying. Your spray booth needs get expensive fast if you plan to spray nitro with either a regular compressor or an HVLP system.

Second, there are some very decent water based finishes that you can either spray or apply by hand. You might want to consider those.

Personally, I go very old school and hand apply french polish. It is safe and it looks great. Most folks would not do that on an electric, however.

The method that might work best for you is the rattle can method. Stewart-MacDonald sells rattle cans of very high quality nitro. If you can spray outside before it gets too cold, this might be the ideal way for you to apply nitro and not risk life and limb (and lungs and brain cells) in the process.

[Jeremy Marcoe]

Thanks for the info guys. I have a decent storage shed to use as a "spray booth" if you will, and it wouldnt be too hard to setup a good exhaust on it. Most of the time I can leave the doors open and spray toward them while using a respirator as I have done this for other projects in the past.