12-10-2009, 10:38 AM
I've moved my booth from my basement workshop to a separate room in the garage. The benefits are no more paint smell in the house (my wife came home one day and complained about "that stinky paint": I had brush-painted some small parts about an hour earlier, using PollyScale water-based paint. 
) and no more compressor noise in the house. I often work late at night, so now my painting will bother no one.
The drawback is that the garage is about 100' behind the house and, of course, unheated. This means that everything - paint, airbrush, thinners, and models to be painted need to get to and from the shop without getting rained or snowed upon, or blown away by a gust of wind. I also have to pre-heat the paint room before running the compressor, although, so far, I haven't needed to leave the heat on while painting. We'll see what happens when the weather gets colder. I use a portable electric heater, but with the "room" just under 4'X6', it doesn't take long to warm-up.
In addition to making the room "critter proof" (the garage was once a house, but is over 100 years old, with an indigenous population of mice, chipmunks, snakes, and sometimes, red squirrels), I installed a screened replacement air intake. When the exhaust fan is running, I open a through-the-wall duct to allow fresh air into the room. The improvement in fan performance is astonishing. Operating inside the house, the fan couldn't get enough replacement air due to the "tightness" of the house construction, even with a window open in the next room. Even with the fan running for a couple of hours after the painting was finished, paint odours lingered.
With the new set-up, odours are almost gone as soon as painting is completed. The booth and fan are the same, and the run to outdoors is still about 6' (although I've used 4" aluminum duct instead of 4" flexible plastic).
I installed a turntable in the booth when I built it, but almost never use it. Instead, I have a collection of leftover 1"x2", 1"x1", and various odd-size pieces of wood that serve as painting "handles". Simply slip the body shell over a suitably-sized stick, hold the stick in a latex-gloved hand, and spray. For small items, I place them on a piece of masking tape, sticky side up, then tape the tape to another stick.
And, despite what you say about updraft booths, the only time that anything falls from the filter area at the top of the booth is when I change the filter (one half of a standard 11"X20" fibreglass furnace filter). The back of the booth is well-coated with overspray, as is the floor and turntable (that's why I can't see filter life being very long in such designs), but I don't have any problem with paint particles falling back onto the item being painted.
For lighting, in addition to an overhead fluorescent fixture, I use two desk lamps, as shown below, on adjustable arms. The picture is from the shop in the house, but the current set-up in the garage is the same. Some of my "painting sticks" are visible in the foreground.
![[Image: Shopviews008.jpg]](http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b399/doctorwayne/Layout%20room%20tour/Shopviews008.jpg)
Wayne
) and no more compressor noise in the house. I often work late at night, so now my painting will bother no one.The drawback is that the garage is about 100' behind the house and, of course, unheated. This means that everything - paint, airbrush, thinners, and models to be painted need to get to and from the shop without getting rained or snowed upon, or blown away by a gust of wind. I also have to pre-heat the paint room before running the compressor, although, so far, I haven't needed to leave the heat on while painting. We'll see what happens when the weather gets colder. I use a portable electric heater, but with the "room" just under 4'X6', it doesn't take long to warm-up.
In addition to making the room "critter proof" (the garage was once a house, but is over 100 years old, with an indigenous population of mice, chipmunks, snakes, and sometimes, red squirrels), I installed a screened replacement air intake. When the exhaust fan is running, I open a through-the-wall duct to allow fresh air into the room. The improvement in fan performance is astonishing. Operating inside the house, the fan couldn't get enough replacement air due to the "tightness" of the house construction, even with a window open in the next room. Even with the fan running for a couple of hours after the painting was finished, paint odours lingered.
With the new set-up, odours are almost gone as soon as painting is completed. The booth and fan are the same, and the run to outdoors is still about 6' (although I've used 4" aluminum duct instead of 4" flexible plastic).
I installed a turntable in the booth when I built it, but almost never use it. Instead, I have a collection of leftover 1"x2", 1"x1", and various odd-size pieces of wood that serve as painting "handles". Simply slip the body shell over a suitably-sized stick, hold the stick in a latex-gloved hand, and spray. For small items, I place them on a piece of masking tape, sticky side up, then tape the tape to another stick.
And, despite what you say about updraft booths, the only time that anything falls from the filter area at the top of the booth is when I change the filter (one half of a standard 11"X20" fibreglass furnace filter). The back of the booth is well-coated with overspray, as is the floor and turntable (that's why I can't see filter life being very long in such designs), but I don't have any problem with paint particles falling back onto the item being painted.
For lighting, in addition to an overhead fluorescent fixture, I use two desk lamps, as shown below, on adjustable arms. The picture is from the shop in the house, but the current set-up in the garage is the same. Some of my "painting sticks" are visible in the foreground.
Wayne