I bought an Earlex 3500 HVLP

[John Gregory]

It will be here next week. I did a lot of research and searching on SMC. The 3500 is a good value for me. I ordered it from Woodcraft with a $15 off coupon, that basically paid for the cleaning kit. One thing about Woodcraft is they include and 1.5 mm tip, $25 value, that other vendors do not include. So I get the 1.5 and the 2.0 tips.

So my question is... any tips for a new HVLP user? This thing should spray anything that takes less than 160 seconds to drain the viscosity cup. I will try Minwax Polycrylic. Those that have tried that product and E6000, how do they compare?

Any thoughts, tips or suggestions will be appreciated.

[Larry Fox]

Tips:

- Spray some water or DNA onto cardboard to get used to spraying and how all the knobs and switches on the gun (and turbine?) work. Especially get comfy with the fan adjustments and any pressure settings.
- When you are comfy with step 1 move on to some actual finishes. Start with something opaque so you can get a feel for how to overlap and how far to hold the gun away (this will vary but you get the idea, get used to determining the distance). This will also give you a sesne of how fast to move the gun and also give you a sense of how much it stinks to clean a spray gun.
- After this, I would step it up to some of the finishes that you will actually be spraying (clearcoats and such). This will tell you, among other things, how bad your currnt lighting is. You will want a raking light so you can see your wet line. Try different settings to understand how your rig responds to them and the result in the finish. For example, TRY and get orange peel, TRY and get a dry shoot, TRY and get some runs. Part of spray finishing is being able to get yourself out of a jam as they are inevitable if you do enough of it.
- I would also try and spray into a cabinet with the back on it or the corners of a drawer to see the effects and be aware of some of the issues there. Play with the settings to mitigate some of them.
- Keep your spray gun CLEAN. A clean gun works so much better than a dirty one. If a dirty gun sputters it will do so right in the middle of the showiest face of that project you worked so hard on AND it will happen on the last coat - DAMHIKT. Murphy's Law.
- If you are spraying anything with a flamable solvent, make sure you take the proper safety precautions.
- Ventilate the areas well and wear gloves and a resperator - even with WB stuff. HVLP is less overspray not no overspray. Some of the stuff that you could spray are horrifically bad for you. Read the MSDS. Game changes when you spray it.

Also - and this should be obvious - don't do any of this on a project piece. Take a decent amount of scrap and try it. Bigger samples are better than smaller ones. A 4' x 4' sample is going to tell you a lot more about your spray ability than a 4" x 4" one.

Spraying is pretty easy and these tests should go pretty quickly but they are important ones as they will allow you to approach it with confidence.

As to your question about Minwax Polycrylic and E6000. I have never sprayed MinWax Polycrylic but I ahve sprayed General Finishes Polycrylic and tons of the EM6000 and they both spray like butter. They are very forgiving.