Spraying lots of parts - Turntable/lazy Susan

[Matt Day]

I'm finishing up my first knock down spray booth and have a few projects ready for paint. My booth will be in my garage and i want to only spray towards the outside. The main project and most complicated is a RAS restoration which has lots of parts (4 legs, base, 2 arms, column base, blade cover, yoke, many small parts, etc).

My question is what is the best way to handle all these parts so I don't have the booth setup for the next month?

I had thought of using a lazy Susan Bearing from LV and making some kind of interchangeable table system so I can spray a batch, remove it to dry, repeat.

Or should I hang some of the parts? It would be harder to control the object that way i think.

Any thoughts or suggestion?

[Mark Kornell]

A lazy Susan is an excellent idea. It isn't always the best solution but it will come in handy very often. Given the low cost, just do it.

I built one with the LV bearing. (Also have seen the same or similar bearing at Home Depot.) Take two pieces of scrap plywood or MDF and 3 minutes to make.

[Bill Neely]

No other input but to say that a Lazy Susan bearing from Home Depot works fine. They have several sizes if I remember correctly.

[Wayne Cannon]

I don't remember the diameters, but I made a turntable from two 30" lengths of galvanized pipe in nesting sizes(maybe 2" and 1-1/2") attached to two round disks of plywood using pipe flanges (one disk is the base and one is the table top, their pipes sliding one inside the other). It turns much easier than ball-bearing turntables, such as LV's, is its own stand-alone turntable spray stand, and easily knocks down for storage. I also have nesting pairs of 24" and 36" lengths of pipe for different table heights.

[Todd Burch]

To be the quickest, you probably want to employ several techniques.

I agree with the others that a turntable is great. I use different sizes of them a lot. Once you construct the turntable, you will want to use a sacrificial top for it, so you are not, over time, adding gobs and gobs of new paint to it. A sacrificial top can be 1/4" ply, hardboard, or other scrap. Think about a) spraying a part and then b) moving that part, on its own sacrificial top, while it is wet, to another location to dry. The sacrificial top can double as the transport table for the part you are spraying. I use masking paper sometimes, as a sacrificial top, for lightweight parts, and also to provide a base cover for my turntable (between the top of the turntable and the sacrificial top) which allows me to utilize sacrificial tops that aren't necessarily large enough (in size of shape) to cover the turntable. Cardboard works too. I also use scrap sticks to raise items up in the air some, to allow bottom corners of parts to not adhere to the sacrificial top or masking paper.

I use a lot of annealed wire to make temporary hanging hooks for small items. If an item has a through hole in it, and is small, and most of the part is getting painted, I use this wire to support it and then, after painting, I hang it somewhere else to dry. I find it quicker to not mask (masking tape) areas of parts that don't need paint and remove overspray later, than to mask and remove the tape later. Sometimes I tape, but smaller, rounded or curved pieces take a lot of time to properly tape.

When spraying small parts, you can lay an open cardboard box behind it to catch a lot of overspray. Makes cleanup easier. You can also open a cardboard box on the floor, put some sticks or rods across the top, for items you cannot hang, and spray them and have the overspray go down into the box to catch it.

Wetting the floor prior to spraying protects the floor from overspray and keeps dust down. Not much water is needed either.

Finally, putting the first coat on light allows you to put a heavier, second coat on. As the first light coat starts to cure, it gets sticky, and does a good job of holding the second coat on. A lot of aerosols will say "apply second coat within 1 hour or after 24 hours…" It's that within the first hour timeframe you want to leverage. You can use the overspray on the sacrificial top to gauge the stickiness of the part.

Todd

[Keith Outten]

I use a turntable on occasion but the majority of the time I prefer to use magnets when I can. Its easy to move each piece after they have been painted or stained to get them out of the way. I use salvaged hard drive magnets, the small ones in these two pictures will hold a few pounds, the large SCSI multi-platter magnets will hold up to about 30 pounds each. For heavier objects I use either welding triangular magnets or large hold down style magnets that I purchase from Big Lots when they are on sale.

For large stuff that is difficult to hang I keep some 1/4" round rod in my inventory so I can custom bend hangers and hang the parts from the square tubing that is suspended from my garage door rails.
.

[Matt Day]

Thanks for the ideas guys. I'll play around with it and make a couple prototypes and see how they work.