Thursday, June 4, 2009

From The Workshop: Economy Spray Booth

A spray booth gives you a dedicated place to apply spray primer, base color, and spray varnish. When I got back into the hobby a while ago, I decided I wanted some kind spray booth so I scoured the Internet and found many expensive, professional looking kits and some less expensive, homemade ideas. I suppose one has to balance features vs. cost. There can be a great satisfaction to buying the components and building it your self but the same satisfaction can be had by opening up a well-made, fancy kit. For me it came down to one thing...the smell of paint.

Many people I have read about have to deal with spraying indoors. That creates the need for some kind of exhaust system that leads to a nearby window. I am fortunate enough to have my own garage and that definitely offers some leeway. Spraying can occur anytime I want and the smell stays outside.

My booth is small but suitable for my needs. It consists of a medium size plastic tote and a plastic "lazy susan". For those who don't know, a lazy susan is a round disk set on small bearings; you can set food or condiments on it in the center of your table for easy access during meals. I just made sure that my lazy susan would sit flat on the side of the tote. My cost for both items was around $25. I found some old speaker stands in the garage and "boom goes the dynamite"...spray booth. I use some scrap cardboard to serve as a carrier to and from my booth.

For me, the bottom line on this project is: work smarter, not harder.

For those of you who want to go a few steps beyond what I have done, here is a link to a great example: Economy Paint Booth for Models

For those that want to look at some fancier kits, here is a link to follow:15"x20" Standard Spray Paint Booth. The link will take you to a very cool website called Micro-Mark. If you're like me, you will spend a lot of time checking out all the interesting tools they have for modeling.

The war goes on,
Hessler

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