Mark Sweany on fri 2 jan 98
I guess I'll jump in here since I did commercial painting and
finishing for over 20 years and have used a number of spray
booths, all of which were commercially manufactured, and OSHA,
and EPA approved. I guess my first recomendation would be to
buy a commercial booth. Used ones come up for sale fairly
regularly and you will have a lot fewer headaches with permits
and such. As far as codes go, if you are spraying, generally
you have to be in an area that is, minimally, zoned for light
industrial, so your talkin' the big money for rent. If it isn't
so zoned, you will be illegal and subject to some hefty fines if
one of your friendly neighbors reports you. (ya, I know, I never
worry about that stuff either) As far as the exhaust is
concerned, what they are mainly concerned with is hydrocarbons.
With water based material you don't have that problem. The
particulates can be removed pretty well with filters. You don't
use furnace filters or something like that. There are filtering
materials that are manufactured for spray booths. They come in
certain standard sizes, or can be purchased in rolls, so you can
cut your own. Talk to the people at your local auto body supply
store. They will fix you right up and probably be glad to give
you some tips if you are nice to them.
The cleanest booth that I ever used with water soluble material,
used a blower to pull air through a big piece of fine burlap
that had water flowing flowing down it into a large basin. The
over-spray was simply pulled through. The air was outside and
the particulates were captured by the water and the water was
constantly filtered as it was pumped out of the basin and back
up to run down the canvas again. The booth that I worked in was
very large. We were painting new irrigation equipment, so it
had to be big. Three of us could stand in front of it and work
and not spray each other, but a table top version for doing
smaller stuff, shouldn't be too hard to make. I'm hoping you
can picture what I'm trying to describe.
In truth, the booth that you described would be fine as long as
you used filters that are made for the purpose. It would also be
the simplest. I would use Formica for the inside. If you
aren't using any petroleum based products, you would be wasting
your money to go with a explosion-proof electrical instalation.
Us a squirrel cage blower that is run by a pulley and belt,
rather than a fan for the exhaust on either set-up.
I hope this is of some help. If you have questions, just e-mail
me.
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