The paint booth is done! I installed the missing wall yesterday and finished the last bits today.
You can see that I filter the air before blowing it out, to get rid of the overspray. The filter material again is vacuum cleaner bags.
I have a window above the spray table so that I can open the outside window for the exhaust funnel. To be able to reach that far I need to fold the spray table away. Here is my hi-tech solution for holding it in place:
Now back to aluminum. Woohoooo!
There was some progress during the past three weeks, even though I didn't write anything here. A few evenings of 3D puzzle shuffling, aka "how do I build four walls and a ceiling in a room such that I make use of the full size of the room and still can staple plastic foil to the outside of the booth". If you have space to build the wooden frames it's trivial to set up a booth like this. If your work space is confined to the final size of the booth, because otherwise you can't get the parts through the door, things start to get interesting. But I'm almost there, only the wall with the exhaust is missing, and of course the spray table (for which I will reuse the chicken wire frame I already have).
Here is the exhaust fan before closing the lower part of the side you are looking at. The fumes will leave the casing at the top, blowing them out of the window.
And this is the current status of the booth. 8x36W fluorescent tubes for 35 square feet is lots of light! Note that I can mount the lights inside the booth since I only use waterborne paint, nothing explosive. On the right you see the open door with the filter for the incoming air -- I simply use the largest vacuum cleaner bag I could find. One of these bags covers half the door. You can also see the exhaust fan facing the window.
Some more wood work today, and I have to say I like aluminum better. Here's the structure for the fume extractor. I need this funny shape to get around the spray table and to the window.
Before you ask: Yes, that's the Nov. 2010 calendar picture on the wall. I haven't received the 2011 calendar yet, so I keep the nice 2010 pictures around until it arrives.
Building in the living room has advantages, but also drawbacks. One major drawback is that I can't prime inside the house, and now in winter I also can't prime outside. So I have decided to build a paint booth. I have a small room that qualifies as "bedroom" in this country, even though there is no way to fit a standard sized bed into it. So far I had used it for storage. Now it will become my top-of-the-art paint booth:
The plan is to use battens and thick plastic foil to construct a booth, and to install a fan that blows the fumes out of the window. I only use waterborne paint, nothing flamable, so the fan doesn't have to be explosion proof. Here is the fan (yes, I'm using safety wire to hold it in place):
To give you an idea where the fan will be located:
You can see that I have covered the floor with fiber board to protect the carpet. The boxes on both sides of the fan are closed with fiber board on the back and on the outer sides. The top and front will be covered with a filter to keep the overspray away from the fan; same for the front face of the fan. The downstream side of the fan (pointing upwards) will get a fiber board channel to the window.
