Building Your Own Airbrush Spray Booth
 

Just wanted to share my project with you all.

I currently use a Paasche spray booth. I like it a lot, but I use a lot of pearlized taxidermy paints and they have to be sprayed at 50-60 PSI to keep them cleanly exiting the brush. The booth’s fan doesn't have enough power to retain all the overspray in the box when shooting at that pressure, so I often end-up with spray dust on the surrounding surfaces. Another pain is the fact that the booth vents into the room so fumes are still in the house.

I want to build a booth that with higher airflow that vents to the outside. Safety concerns include:

• Ignition of flammable vapors.
• Drawing CO into the basement by overcoming the furnace's ability to vent exhaust to the outside.

The first issue is easily avoided by continuing to use only water-based paints. The only approved option for flammable solvent-based paints is using an explosion-proof motor. Cincinnati Fan makes these, but they are extremely expensive. In the article at the bottom of this thread, it is suggested that a fan/blower with a design that keeps the motor out of the airstream is reasonably safe, but obviously not to the degree an explosion-proof motor is.

Although I use water-based paints, I am going with a blower that does not have its motor in the airstream.

The article below is pretty good, it allowed me to practically calculate the CFM needed for the fan for the spray booth design I want to use and amount/type of ductwork needed to exhaust it to the outside. The calculations I came up with indicated I needed at least a 417 CFM fan/blower. The blower I am ordering is a Dayton 6FHX7, rated at 495 CFM. It’s a squirrel-cage design with the motor out of the airstream, and it has a shaded-pole motor which can be operated at variable speeds so I can dial it down when doing lower-PSI detail airbrushing.

I’m looking forward to renovating the room in the basement I'm going to use for this purpose. It’s going to take me a while to frame the room, rig the ductwork and build the supporting platform for the blower, but I’ll post as I go.

If you ever thought about venting your airbrush booth to the outside, the following article has a lot of useful information: Model Car Tech: Paint Booth Design

In the near-term, I will remove the motor from the back of the Paasche spray booth and just duct the booth to the new motor. This summer I will have the time to build a deeper spray booth which will be built-in to the bench.

If you have built a spray booth and/or ventilated it to the outside, I'd love to hear some advice and/or pitfalls to avoid on venting and/or booth design.

Thanks,

Eric