My spray room

[Kanvas Keepsakes]

Hey guys I wanna pick some of your brains on anything I'm missing or ideas you all may have that would improve my spray room.  It was built about 6months ago.  One thing for sure that I know I need to do is get some kind of ventilation going on in there. I'm in deep south Texas and the heat and humidity is horrible.  If I spray and it's real hot out even at like 5 or 6pm, I walk out the room dripping in sweat.  I also staple my canvases straight up and down on the walls and spray directly like that.  It's not a real big room so don't have room to do things like Bill Atkinson although I wish I did or knew how to.  Any constructive criticism is appreciated.  Thanks

[bill t.]

Um, that water heater is a little worrisome.  In sixth grade the fire marshall demonstrated a dust explosion inside a sealed paint can with an electric squib igniter.  It was pretty dramatic!  Just being on the safe side.

Absolute minimum improvements would include taping or tacking sheets of corrugated cardboard or foamcore to the walls and ceiling to absorb overspray.  Your wall will get really ugly before you know it, especially the parts that support the prints.  You can at least slow it down.

Go down to Lowes and buy a 20" square box fan for about $15.  Find a furnace filter that will fit over the opening.  Tape the filter onto the fan. Turn it on over in the corner. That will slightly improve the airborne dust problem, and slightly limit the amount of dust that will land on the floor and just about everywhere else.  Clean or change the filter pretty often.  A more extreme case might be punching a hole in the door for the fan and filter, dumping the air out into the garage which will then accumulate dust at a slightly lower rate than the room itself.

You could rig up a tube and fan to take air from the room and deliver it outside through a partially opened garage door.  Don't know what's actually available but I wonder if a bathroom ventilation fan and ducting could be so adapted.  Maybe you could install a bathroom fan in the room, tape a filter over it before use.

And do your spraying in the morning or after sunset.  I am partial to temps between about 50 and 70F for best coating, which can get me out of bed pretty early sometimes.  At higher humidities higher temps may be ok.

Vertical prints are OK and will greatly reduce the amount of dust that settles onto your wet prints.   But limit yourself to fairly light coats that will lay down about 3 to 4ml  per square foot of whatever dilution of solution you are using, on each coat.  Those should settle without creating runs.  Two coats should do it in most cases.

[Kanvas Keepsakes]

Thank you Bill!  Awesome advice . .  I'll post updated pics asap with the improvements.

[Justan]

A few comments to add to Bill’s

If you tape the prints to gatorboard or mighty-core you can move them pretty easily even when wet. The blue tape you can get at in the painting area of home depot or similar works great with canvas. If you mount some large binder clips to the wall with nails or screws, you can hang the gator board from the binder clips.

If you haven’t done so already, Google hipaa full face respirator. You can get a good one for around $100. When spraying, you might want to wear old clothing that covers you from head to foot.

I’ll second Bill’s comments about an exhaust fan. Your lungs will thank you for an exhaust system and a good respirator.

Wish I could carve out about that much space for spraying!!

[bill t.]

a good respirator.

Excellent point.  I would add that goggles are also a very good idea, especially if you are doing a lot of spraying.  Like almost everything else, I learned that the hard way.  Just google goggles.  It may take a bit of experimentation to find a pair of goggles and a mask that cooperate with each other.  The worst situation is when your exhalations get pushed up into the goggles, instant whiteout!

For a well ventilated area the 3M 8511 filter may be enough.  Lowes etc have them.  It has a respirator valve so you don't wind up rebreathing your own smog.  I also use those for cutting moulding.  But for hard core dust build up situations, a real filtered respirator with an organic cartridge is probably a good idea.  I'm not sure what kind of bad things with scary names lurk inside those coatings, but why take a chance.

And Coroplast is also a good tape-up backing for prints.   You can get it 51" x 97" which easily allows 2, 24" x whatever prints to be taped up top and bottom, a feat not possible with the more usual 48" sheets.  Use 7mm, anything thinner is too floppy.  You will need to support it with 2 nails or screws driven into the wall exactly 95" apart, punch matching holes in the Coroplast.

And the new "Eagle" brand blue tape at Lowes is not recommended.  Leaves a residue on canvas, and the tack is too aggressive.   It is in no way a substitute for 3M blue tape which is ideal for canvas taping, embodying goodness, light, and everything right in a simple 1" thick roll.

[fetish]

yes goggles and a good comfortable respirator mask is very important.

This is the circular ventilator I built for my spraying room / workshop.

You can see it's made up of 2 units of 24x24" G3 prefilters one on top of the other, and it has 2 additional F8 baffled HEPA filters behind them. They're powered by a high pressure inline fan which circulates the air upwards where it travels along the ceiling and ends up on the other side of the spray area. the circulating air movements will sweep up any overspray back into the filter unit. I do 60x120" canvasses with no problems with this setup.

[Justan]

If you haven’t done so already, Google hipaa full face respirator. You can get a good one for around $100. When spraying, you might want to wear old clothing that covers you from head to foot.

As example, here's the one i use: