O.T. Airless paint sprayer

[Howard Pollack]

I have a lot of painting to do and thought that the work would go much faster if I could paint the corners with an airless sprayer. Does anyone know which (if any) would be useful for this. Thanks-Howard

[Marcus Hutchison]

Hello Howard,

What are you painting, & with what kind of paint? I have a Nova airless sprayer that I use to spray cabinets. You can't beat an airless for time savings. The trick is sizing the tip to what you are spraying. You have to use a different tip for spraying different finishes. You can get a great finish with a little practice & it goes on really fast. I would stay away from the cheap diaphram pumps like you see at HD. I bought one at first, but the laquer melted the seals in the gun & I had to take it back & buy a better sprayer. All in all, the sprayer has saved me alot of time & has been well worth the cost.

Marcus

[Charles McKinley]

Hi Howard,

If you give us some more information about what you want to do we can giveyou a more direct answer. (What material? What are you spraying?)

If you are painting rooms inside your house the overspray is terrible with an airless. The high pressure causes lots of bounce back and poor transfer to the surface being painted. Now if you are ripping out carpets or other flooring or do a lot of careful covering, secured well with TAPE (DAMHIKT) spraying is a lot faster. I believe that spraying is the only way to deal with popcorn ceilings short of ripping them down.

As far as what to buy, I have a Graco ES 790. The man at the paint store told me in not so many words it was the smallest unit worth selling. It is available at the orange box but I bought mine off of ebay at a $400 savings. Todd Burch has posted a lot of information about using his airless sprayer to paint cabinets. You may want to try searching his post.

If this is not going to be a common job I woud recommend renting. I spent about $350 on my set up about 3-4 years ago. e
Even if you will be doing a lot of it I would rent or get reps to come and give you a demo before you buy to get the best set up for your needs.

Airless is a poor choice for small jobs do to the clean up. The hoses also take a lot of material to prime them. Todd's rep told him shortening the hose would cause surging in the spray.

Happy searching. I hope this helped.

[richard cabell]

I bought a titan 640ix airless sray pump and I will like to know what reversible tip shoul be appropiate for painting extirior of a house. I have another question if you keep a sprayer tilted will that some cause fluid to come out? will :) appreciate your help

[Dave Bonde]

I had the same situation as you are in, about a month ago. I am going through a major remodel which included new cement board and shingle siding. I bought a Graco RX7 sprayer and couldn't be happier. It is about $500 (which is a big investment for me) and would put the primer and paint on as fast as I could spray it with no thinning. It surprised me on how accurate I could be and with very little overspray. It takes about 15 minutes to clean the system and you can recover almost all of the paint from the hose so there isn't much waste. I had never used an airless sprayer, I do have a HVLP system I spray laquer with. The unit came with an instructional video that helped a lot. I chose the XR7 over the RX5 ($100 cheaper model)because of 3 main reasons 1) Metal gun vs Plastic gun 2) 50ft hose vs 25ft hose 3) the RX7 had a deal where you got 3 free tips with it (worth about $75) I picked the Graco brand because I had a coupon for HD that saved me a few bucks. I checked into renting a sprayer and it was $260 per week. I checked to see what they were selling for on ebay and figured I could sell the unit if I wanted to after I got all my projects done. As I said before it was a large investment money wise but I feel it was money well spent. Dave