Tip: Paint Booth

[Frank Jackson]

This is the paint booth I built for painting my RV7 at home. It is 10'x20' and constructed of 1.25" PVC pipe using PVC structural fittings for joints and snap clamps to attach the plastic. The fans are the cheapest 20x20 available with the least expensive 20x20 filters bought in bulk and taped to the fans. I ended up using 3 fans on each end; one end blowing in, the other blowing out. There are 6 fluorescent light fixtures in the ceiling which was plenty, but could have used more light on the sides. The fixtures were 4' double T5 hi-intensity lights. The lights and fans were all wired through switches with romex and needed 3 cords to plug in the whole booth. The snap clamps allowed for opening up the booth to move material in and out and made replacement of the plastic sheet easy when it got too dirty from spray. A paint mask with positive airflow was used while painting. This may seem like overkill to some and not adequate for others, but the resulting paint job was better than most professional jobs. An amateur painter was hired to do the actual painting which was 2 stage- base coat/ clear coat. Sanding and buffing after painting was very labor intensive. With a lot of help from friends the total cost was approx $7000 with about $600 of it for the paint booth. Snap clamps and pvc fittings are available from retailers listed on the snap clamp website.

http://s1276.photobucket.com/user/Fr...50359156727791

[Mike S]

Frank, welcome aboard the good ship VAF

Very nice looking plane, and it was painted at home!!!!!

[flyboy1963]

this is a great booth....one more thought is that you could do it in clear poly.
very little overspray would get on the upper half, and you could hang your lights on the OUTSIDE, thereby mitigation the fumes, fire, explosion risk.
Fans could be filtered and setup to only blow IN, so the exit air vents and any leakage would be OUT, no dust getting IN that way.