Well, I've been using my little spray gun pretty successfully to apply Cermark to Yeti/Rtic cups for the last year. I had noticed though that the overspray has been pretty excessive and the gun also needed to be cleaned pretty badly, so I decided to take it all apart, clean it, and try to re-calibrate it. I'm sure you can see where this is going...
Now I can't seem to get things back to even the way they were. The pressure doesn't seem to be high enough, or something is clogging, at what I thought were my old settings. And when I open it up with more "paint" volume, it sprays all over the place. So, my questions are two-fold.
First, what pressure do you normally run a 1.00 mm tip hvlp gun at with Cermark? The gun has a regulator and the "manual" (all 1.5 pages) says that the correct range is 49-60 psi. But is that supposed to be the max pressure coming out of the compressor's regulator? Or the pressure the gun's regulator is delivering? It seems like most of the articles I've read say ideal hvlp pressure is only 19-24 psi. Or do guns vary that much? And I'm also confused as to why a gun that has a regulator on it, also has an air adjustment knob on the bottom!?
Second question, is there anything similar in weight and consistency to Cermark that you use to test your settings and calibrate the gun? I've tried just using DNA in the gun and adjusting it while testing on cardboard; but it evaporates extremely quickly and is very hard (impossible) to judge for the correct level of atomization. Would acrylic paint or something like that be similar enough in consistency? Or something else? Just tired of wasting $$$ spraying cermark all over the place trying to get ideal settings locked in once and for all.