Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

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David-Ithaca-NY
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Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by David-Ithaca-NY »

I have been using Tamiya acrylics for years, brush and airbrush. I have just bought a bunch of Zero paints and clears.

I guess it is time to finally build a proper spray booth.
Do you guys just use a suction fan and a filter? Do you vent the output to the outside world or just to the room via filter?
thanks
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smbrm1
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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by smbrm1 »

I suggest you search F1m for “paint booth”. There has been lots of discussion on this topic. All are worth reading to allow for an informed decision. And yes you want to vent to the outside in addition to other precautions.

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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by David-Ithaca-NY »

thank you
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Makulit
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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by Makulit »

I have gone down this street .

Like most of the Chinese made booths come with a worthless odd shape vent, which allows bugs and cold air to vent in
I went to Lowes and purchased a drier vent flap door. and used some leftover plastic panels, and drilled a 4inch hole

and now I have a vent to outside and little cold air entry
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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by dgwoodward2 »

Here is what I built, using their parts and love it.

https://vent-works.com/blogs/the-ventil ... pray-booth
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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by Seema »

In the beginning I also experimented with PC fans but never got a satisfactory result. Now I use an extractor hood for € 49.90 and an exhaust air hose with a diameter of 15-20 cm that is led outside. It works very well and filter material is very cheap in the bsum market. The size of the exhaust air hose is important. Tried vacuum cleaner tubes before. But they cannot evacuate the amount of air and cause a backlog. I've been using it with Tamiya acrylic and varnish for about 1 year. Even with the sharp zero paint colors, the odor pollution is very low. In addition, a professional paint mask is required. Because my health is very important to me. All in all, the system didn't cost me more than € 150. I am very satisfied with my self-construction and they have improved my paintwork a lot.
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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by sky1911 »

Interesting topic. I'm currently in the process of building my own spraybooth and am going to use multiplex wood, 150 (6 in) tubing and a 150 mm fan (385 cfm I think). I'm hoping that the fan, once the filters are in place, will have enough power to get suck the fumes out of the cabin. My filter setup will be two-part. The first layer will be a rather thick (70mm) but coarse and low density filter to catch the larger paint particles followed by a second filter that is much thinner (~10 mm) made of active coal (or whatever that translates to). This should take care of some more of the fumes and particles in the hopes that the fan will not get covered in dirt too soon.

I'm linking two pictures as they are rather big (full resolution) and take forever to load at time
https://i.ibb.co/SJ7sRr2/IMG-3774.jpg
https://i.ibb.co/z4qSZ0m/IMG-3773.jpg

The filtration system is not in place in those pictures as I'm currently waiting for the first filter to be shipped. The rear part of the booth will house the filters. I'm thinking of having them behind an angled piece of wood which is closer to the back wall at the bottom and farther away at the top. The piece of wood will leave 1-2 cms on all 4 sides to the walls of the box.
Cheers,
Roman

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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by robdebie »

You can roughly judge the capability of the blower by its power. I see plenty of people using one or two computer casing fans, of say 10W each. That is laughable little power if you use filters or some length of ducting. I use a blower from a kitchen range hood, of ~100W, that works reasonably well, but it does not have enough air flow to catch all paint when I'm blasting away to paint a car body. I hope to upgrade soon to a 150+ Watt blower.

The carbon filter that you want to use sounds like it's quite restrictive. Note that the flow decreases rapidly with the 'drag' of the filters and tubing, and can go down to zero. If you want to go scientific, find this type of graph for your blower:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/David-White-47/publication/256761670/figure/fig29/AS:669480493539335@1536627996206/Figure-B2-Commercial-centrifugal-fan-performance-curve-56.png

You could measure the pressure drop over the filters using a U-tube filled with water. I want to try that one nice day :-)

Rob
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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by sky1911 »

Cheers Rob,

I've been around PC fans for a couple of decades. In my opinion they are good enough for a light breeze in your case but as soon as there is some sort of obstacle in the way their performance drops significantly. Add a dust filter and you barely notice the air moving through it. The same is true for using that type of fan in (PC) water cooling settings where you have the fans mounted to a radiator. Air flow decreases significantly and if you increase the speed you also get a significant raise in noise levels. As for the coal filter thing - I'll have to see how dense it really is and how bad the impact on the airflow is. It's of a type similar to the ones you would use in extractor hoods above the stove in the kitchen.
As it stands right now, the big fan in my pic is rated at 75W with 385 cfm / ~650 m³/h or ballpark that. No pressure graph sadly. However, while looking for the fan I kept an eye on noise levels, as the more power they have, the louder they run - and that was a nono for me.
After all this is my first build, so we'll see how that turns out. I'm hoping that the performance will be better than some of the small ready made things you can buy on fleabay and elsewhere (using PC fans...).
Cheers,
Roman

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Re: Ventilation-Booths and spray painting

Post by robdebie »

I checked my current spray booth with a power meter, and it's a 55W unit (former kitchen range hood). I would say that's enough for general airbrushing, but not for spraying at full blast. My yet to be used larger blower is a 120W unit. I expect that to be the right size for my purposes.

Rob
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