Portable / Knockdown Spray Booth

[George Bokros]

Anyone have a portable / knock down spray booth? Did you buy or make it?

I plan to only spray water borne finishes, dyes, stains and topcoats, this being said would it be necessary to have an exhaust fan to the outside?

Any tips or pointers? I am planning that I would be able to do this in my basement since winters are to cold here on the north coast and the garage is owned by one of my other hobbies, muscle cars.

Thanks

[John TenEyck]

I use a temporary spray booth in my basement shop that allows me to spray shellac and WB products year round. It's nothing more than plastic sheeting hung from nails in the floor joists in a U shape. It takes less than 10 minutes to set up or take down. I fold up the plastic and reuse it. In 5 years I'm only on my second piece of plastic.

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Old bed sheets or paper on the floor completes the setup. I specifically located it where there is a fluorescent light in the ceiling, but supplement that with a couple of portable flood lights so I can see what I'm doing. I can't emphasis enough how important good lighting is to doing a good job. And, yes, IMO you definitely want and need exhaust from the spray booth, for two reasons. One, you need to remove the overspray so it doesn't land on your nicely sprayed work and two, you don't want to be breathing that stuff later. Trust me, if you spray for even 10 minutes you'll have a cloud of overspray if you don't exhaust it. I used to use a little squirrel cage fan of about 400 cfm. It worked OK, but not great. Then about 2 years ago I realized that it could bypass the bags on my dust collector and use it. I just run a hose from the inlet of the DC to the back of the spray booth, and another from the outlet to a convenient window. Now I have 1400 cfm of exhaust and never a worry about overspray. I shut off my furnace when I spray to avoid starving it of combustion air or exhaust not going up the chimney. I can spray for an hour in the Winter w/o loosing more than 1 or 2 degrees temp. in the basement, and it recovers very quickly after I'm done.

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John