Air compressor?

[Figbuck]

I hope I don't regret spending the time to post on this, but I will give it a try anyway. This topic was beat to death a couple times last year and the year before that too. When I went to search for the threads, only more recent ones show up and I can't find a single one of them. Too bad. There was a lot of good info there. A pro painter might pick apart what I'm going to say, but in 30 years, I have sprayed a lot of trucks, motorcycles, houses, cabinets, furniture... with all kinds of industrial enamels, urethanes, nitro cellulose lacquers, polyurethanes, conversion varnishes, alked based primers/paints, latex based primers/paints as well as the new water-bourne lacquers.

 

Earl Shieb, no way and I wish I didn't waste the effort typing the name.

 

Macco's are hit and miss but I have had four vehicles done by them where I did all the prep. The cheap jobs are cheap because they blow crap primers and paint as fast as they can. Add cost for door jambs or the under side of the hood, etc. Works OK if you don't change the color, still they don't color match, just follow the formula for the color chip and you will see the difference in color from fading in the old to new work. They get over spray on everything and unless you get everything you want in writing, the painter won't even bend over to shoot the rocker panels and the bottom edge of the pans... it's blow and go. I always used the four to five hundred buck program, the Presidential or something, not the Ambassador. The last truck I had them shoot after I did all the prep is still in OK condition after twelve years and I wash it once a year with industrial cleaner and scrub it with 3M pads to get the grime off! I had to have them shoot it twice because the first time there were too many mistakes. They bitched and moaned, but I walked out and wouldn't pay them until they did it in a workman like way.

 

Picking a compressor is the least of your worries if you decide to try it yourself. At this point you don't even know what you don't know.

 

Any idiot can be a good painter... I'm living proof.

 

But, I have been doing it a long time and have paid dearly for the knowledge and experience. The only reason to do it yourself, is so that you can fix it the next time you get hit or want do another vehicle. Plus with a cheap HLVP cup gun, a good regulator and big enough compressor, you can spray parts with Rustoleum or what ever any time. It is not that hard if you have the know how already and a place to store all the tools, equipment. paint and solvents. If not, then it is a steep learning curve even for a shitty job and it is a lot of hard work, especially if you haven't been through the process before and are not sure of what details to sweat and what to let slide.

 

Automotive paints are deadly. Painting urethanes with out a proper respirator is like welding with out a shield. You need a place to paint, make nasty toxic fumes and to be able to leave the vehicle for a while. I have rented storage spaces with power... covered everything with vis-queen, set up fans and lights, and shot vehicles both in pieces and all together. Never had anything blow up or catch fire, but it is risky. I have shot them outside in fresh air, then pushed them back inside too. Still need a respirator!! You also need a bench or area to measure and mix your primers, primer/sealers, color coats, and clear coats if you go that route. I use a little bent coat hanger in a cordless drill to mix my materials. At a minimum you will need, a Napatha type degreaser to wipe down parts, two part epoxy primer and probably two part acrylic urethane, solvents to clean the guns and maybe the right synthetic reducers. Always wear Nitrile gloves when working. Fingerprints leave oild residue that can cause paint failures.

 

Make sure you wash everything with an industrial degreaser before you start sanding the old finish. Make sure you understand how, when and why to apply body fillers and primers. I had to sand back to bare metal because there were too may coats of crap paint and crap Bondo on it. That brings a whole different set of metal prep chemicals, cost and application time into play. Is it a stock finish or has it been repainted before? There are different primers and primer/surfacers for different substrate conditions. Prep and primer are everything. Paint is just the icing on the cake.

 

Always get the HazMat data sheets and print outs of the mixing instructions from your automotive refinishing product supplier. They don't print that stuff on the container labels. It is for professional use and they assume you know what you are doing. 3M has paint respirators for like twenty bucks that you can get replacement pre filters and charcoal filters for. They last a month and then the charcoal is toast but still make good dust masks. Some of the solvents in modern paints you can't smell. Breathing them is just as good as drinking them. Deadly stuff. Make sure you use Nitrile gloves. I get boxes of a hundred for ten bucks. Latex gloves are no good, solvent goes right through them and right through your skin too. Wear eye protection. If wet over spray gets on your eye lashes, you are fucked. Use Vasaline or women's make up remover to get it off.

 

You can never have too much light. You need two 500 watt halogens work lights at a minimum. I built a light fixture that holds six 750 watt infra red heat lamps to help bake panels and see what I am doing when I'm painting inside. You can paint outside, but it is best with a paint system that flashes off fast. If you use a urethane, you will have bugs and dust nibs for days. It is hard enough inside in a relatively dust free environment.

 

I bought a HVLP Griavity feed spray gun kit from Industrial Finishes, my professional automotive refinishing supplier for a hundred bucks. It came with a primer gun (1.7 orifice) and a paint gun (1.4 orifice), each with cups and caps, plus a small touch up gun with wrenches, low pressure gauge and filters in a plastic case. I keep them really clean and they work as good as my $400 Binks HVLP that I use for finishing furniture.

 

My Jacuzzi two piston, 220 volt, 3HP, 5 Gal. compressor cost me about $1500 new but has lasted me 25 years. I see twin pump units like it on Craigslist once in a while for a couple hundred bucks. There is not that much that can go wrong with them, but from time to time, I have had to replace the pressure switch ($45 to $75) and one or two of the starter capacitors ($35 or $70). Other than that, I change the oil every year and run it all day every day. I run it with a second tank to cool the air and increase capacity. It runs flat out all day long and easily provides enough air to do what you are going to do. My big Ingersol Rand Compressor cost me $800 used ( $4000 new) and has 5HP, 50 Gal. It is a brute. I can run any grinders, sanders, sand blasters, wide open and will still recover and stop running for a few minutes. You can always buy a good compressor used and sell it for what you paid for it when you are done. I have two little 110 compressors I use for running nail guns and stuff. They are portable and were a couple hundred bucks new. You can do a limited amount of painting with them in a pinch, but you would become very frustrated, very fast, trying to paint a vehicle with them. Even with a spare tank. I run a filter before my line regulator/water trap and an inline filter before the gauge on the gun. Always strain your paints and especially primers.

 

NEVER USE RATTLE CAN PRIMER!!!

 

I use PPG paints because they are quality, perform well in application and I can get colors and clears mixed easily from my supplier. PPG has an economy brand called OMNI, that is good stuff and a third to half the price. I have heard pro painters rip on OMNI, but I would not paint an expensive car with it. It is RATSUN quality for sure. A tip is to get more paint than you might use mixed because I ran out once or twice and the colors were not quit the same. That is not a problem with higher quality, more expensive PPG Deltron. OMNI two part epoxy primer works great for the price and I have used it on chrome bumpers, door handles windshield wipers that I wanted to spray with Rustoleum top coat. Two years of sitting outside and they look great. The OMNI MTK Acrylic Urethane is two part, paint, with a hardener. Two coats is good, three is nice and you can buff it out.

 

You can easily spend six, eight hundred or more on paint materials alone. When I painted my 620, I used PPG Deltron base/clear system. The good part is that it flashes off fast so you can fix dust nibs, sags and runs quickly. In fact, once you have sprayed two part epoxy primer, you must apply the color coat in 24 hours and then the clears too, so they bond right chemically. That is the reason behind the base/clear system, so that shops can do spot repairs fast. The problem with that is that the materials have a shelf life. Not the paints or reducers so much as the hardeners. Once you open them they will turn your expensive paint into cottage cheese after a couple months of sitting around.

 

The color coat is just that, color. It sprays like water, so you have to dust it on in two or three coats, until you achieve "hide". The trick is to not put to much on all at once or it will run and sag big time. The clear coats can be block sanded and rubbed out if needed. That is what you see that looks glossy. The color coats by themselves appear flat. If you get a ding or scratch, you just prep the little area, shoot primer on the repair, shoot color coat and clear the whole panel in a few hours. Clear coats generally look glossy like they were waxed. I used a matte clear that is so flat it looks like old school hot rod primer. People ask me if I painted it with a rattle can. No, the paint products alone were $850.

 

If you can let the vehicle sit for a while to dry, an acrylic enamel or acrylic urethanes are a good way to go. They flash off slowly and dry slowly unless you force dry them in an oven or with infra red lights. After two or three coats/days, you will have a tough durable finish that can be buffed out if you want them to look really nice. The thing I hate is that any runs, sags, dust nibs, insects can't be fixed in fifteen minutes. You have to wait for a day to dry. The trick is to dust some on and let it sit for a few seconds, then go back and apply a full wet coat. This is where experience and craftsmanship come into play. It's not that hard to paint just a fender or a hood. But to "walk" the side of a car and keep a wet edge and apply an even full wet coat with out runs or sags doesn't happen automatically. You can waste expensive material and make a horrendous mess very quickly. Even after spraying for years, maybe one out of four jobs goes off perfectly with out a hitch for me. You can snag a hose, bump the pot, have a low pressure sag around the corner of a fender or roof so easily.

 

When I went to paint my 620, I went to the library to get books on automotive refinishing and realized after I went to my auto paint supplier, that all the products had changed because of the clean air standards and VOC compliance. Maybe a dozen books were all full of obsolete and useless info.

 

It is expensive to paint yourself. But you can get a five or ten thousand dollar job for a grand in material and a maybe a grand in tools. In the long run it might be better to do all your body work, strip the parts that you have to, apply a quality epoxy primer and then use 2 to 4 coats of high build primer or primer/surfacer, block sanding between coats. Then the body is water proof and ready for what ever top coats you want to use whenever you get around to it. Epoxy primer alone is not water proof and if there is high humidity rust can start under the primer and it might cause paint failure in the long run.

 

At that point you could do all the masking, then take it to a shop with a booth and let them apply the top coats. Fuck Maaco and duke of Earl. It can't be that hard to find a small paint shop locally that will spray color for you cheap if you do all the prep. Find somebody that will talk to you and help you decide what strategy to use to get the biggest bang for the buck. They can recommend the correct brand and type of paint system to use. Sherwin Williams, Dulux, ICI, Dupont, Etc.

 

I ended up painting my truck in a cold, small, dimly lit garage and it turned out OK, until you look at it up close or in the direct sun. I kind of wasted my time and money because it's should be show quality and it's not. It is holding up great parked outside in the rain and sun though and being a daily driver it already had rock chips and scratches. So it goes. If you have the the space, time and right tools, you can do it though. I didn't have enough time and it came back to bite me.

 

I could go on an on here. There is a lot to know and decide upon. Factors like, what kind of paint job are you looking for? Show quality, clean and serviceable daily driver, don't care what it looks like just that it is cheap and protects against rust?? How much time and space do you have to let the project sit?

 

I spent a lot of time trying to get info and I learned a lot by getting to know a couple of salesman at the automotive paint store. I did many searches on the web for DIY car painting info and read lots of books. 90% of the books in the library were old and out of date, virtually useless. I got a great paper back book by a guy named Tom Brownell used for $12 called How to Restore Your Collector Car, 1999.

 

The next day I was in Baxter's/Shucks auto store and found the hot-set-up book in my opinion. $18.00 It is by Tom Brownell, DO-IT-YOURSELF GUIDE TO CUSTOM PAINTING, 2000. It has all the modern materials and methods described and has good photos too. I highly recommend you read it before you spend a dime.

 

Good Luck...

 

My link

 

My link

[hang_510]

does anyone use a line dryer for paint on their home compressor?

or anything to keep the moisture out. (besides a second tank)

 

 

I hope I don't regret spending the time to post on this, but I will give it a try anyway.

if you do then ill regret gleaning great info from it!

 

Three phase motors are more efficient than single phase. Here it why. With single phase AC voltage, you have zero voltage each time the polarity changes, 120 times a second.

60 cycles = 60 Hz, not 120 :mellow:

[72240z]

I hope I don't regret spending the time to post on this, but I will give it a try anyway. This topic was beat to death a couple times last year and the year before that too. When I went to search for the threads, only more recent ones show up and I can't find a single one of them. Too bad. There was a lot of good info there. A pro painter might pick apart what I'm going to say, but in 30 years, I have sprayed a lot of trucks, motorcycles, houses, cabinets, furniture... with all kinds of industrial enamels, urethanes, nitro cellulose lacquers, polyurethanes, conversion varnishes, alked based primers/paints, latex based primers/paints as well as the new water-bourne lacquers.

 

Earl Shieb, no way and I wish I didn't waste the effort typing the name.

 

Macco's are hit and miss but I have had four vehicles done by them where I did all the prep. The cheap jobs are cheap because they blow crap primers and paint as fast as they can. Add cost for door jambs or the under side of the hood, etc. Works OK if you don't change the color, still they don't color match, just follow the formula for the color chip and you will see the difference in color from fading in the old to new work. They get over spray on everything and unless you get everything you want in writing, the painter won't even bend over to shoot the rocker panels and the bottom edge of the pans... it's blow and go. I always used the four to five hundred buck program, the Presidential or something, not the Ambassador. The last truck I had them shoot after I did all the prep is still in OK condition after twelve years and I wash it once a year with industrial cleaner and scrub it with 3M pads to get the grime off! I had to have them shoot it twice because the first time there were too many mistakes. They bitched and moaned, but I walked out and wouldn't pay them until they did it in a workman like way.

 

Picking a compressor is the least of your worries if you decide to try it yourself. At this point you don't even know what you don't know.

 

Any idiot can be a good painter... I'm living proof.

 

But, I have been doing it a long time and have paid dearly for the knowledge and experience. The only reason to do it yourself, is so that you can fix it the next time you get hit or want do another vehicle. Plus with a cheap HLVP cup gun, a good regulator and big enough compressor, you can spray parts with Rustoleum or what ever any time. It is not that hard if you have the know how already and a place to store all the tools, equipment. paint and solvents. If not, then it is a steep learning curve even for a shitty job and it is a lot of hard work, especially if you haven't been through the process before and are not sure of what details to sweat and what to let slide.

 

Automotive paints are deadly. Painting urethanes with out a proper respirator is like welding with out a shield. You need a place to paint, make nasty toxic fumes and to be able to leave the vehicle for a while. I have rented storage spaces with power... covered everything with vis-queen, set up fans and lights, and shot vehicles both in pieces and all together. Never had anything blow up or catch fire, but it is risky. I have shot them outside in fresh air, then pushed them back inside too. Still need a respirator!! You also need a bench or area to measure and mix your primers, primer/sealers, color coats, and clear coats if you go that route. I use a little bent coat hanger in a cordless drill to mix my materials. At a minimum you will need, a Napatha type degreaser to wipe down parts, two part epoxy primer and probably two part acrylic urethane, solvents to clean the guns and maybe the right synthetic reducers. Always wear Nitrile gloves when working. Fingerprints leave oild residue that can cause paint failures.

 

Make sure you wash everything with an industrial degreaser before you start sanding the old finish. Make sure you understand how, when and why to apply body fillers and primers. I had to sand back to bare metal because there were too may coats of crap paint and crap Bondo on it. That brings a whole different set of metal prep chemicals, cost and application time into play. Is it a stock finish or has it been repainted before? There are different primers and primer/surfacers for different substrate conditions. Prep and primer are everything. Paint is just the icing on the cake.

 

Always get the HazMat data sheets and print outs of the mixing instructions from your automotive refinishing product supplier. They don't print that stuff on the container labels. It is for professional use and they assume you know what you are doing. 3M has paint respirators for like twenty bucks that you can get replacement pre filters and charcoal filters for. They last a month and then the charcoal is toast but still make good dust masks. Some of the solvents in modern paints you can't smell. Breathing them is just as good as drinking them. Deadly stuff. Make sure you use Nitrile gloves. I get boxes of a hundred for ten bucks. Latex gloves are no good, solvent goes right through them and right through your skin too. Wear eye protection. If wet over spray gets on your eye lashes, you are fucked. Use Vasaline or women's make up remover to get it off.

 

You can never have too much light. You need two 500 watt halogens work lights at a minimum. I built a light fixture that holds six 750 watt infra red heat lamps to help bake panels and see what I am doing when I'm painting inside. You can paint outside, but it is best with a paint system that flashes off fast. If you use a urethane, you will have bugs and dust nibs for days. It is hard enough inside in a relatively dust free environment.

 

I bought a HVLP Griavity feed spray gun kit from Industrial Finishes, my professional automotive refinishing supplier for a hundred bucks. It came with a primer gun (1.7 orifice) and a paint gun (1.4 orifice), each with cups and caps, plus a small touch up gun with wrenches, low pressure gauge and filters in a plastic case. I keep them really clean and they work as good as my $400 Binks HVLP that I use for finishing furniture.

 

My Jacuzzi two piston, 220 volt, 3HP, 5 Gal. compressor cost me about $1500 new but has lasted me 25 years. I see twin pump units like it on Craigslist once in a while for a couple hundred bucks. There is not that much that can go wrong with them, but from time to time, I have had to replace the pressure switch ($45 to $75) and one or two of the starter capacitors ($35 or $70). Other than that, I change the oil every year and run it all day every day. I run it with a second tank to cool the air and increase capacity. It runs flat out all day long and easily provides enough air to do what you are going to do. My big Ingersol Rand Compressor cost me $800 used ( $4000 new) and has 5HP, 50 Gal. It is a brute. I can run any grinders, sanders, sand blasters, wide open and will still recover and stop running for a few minutes. You can always buy a good compressor used and sell it for what you paid for it when you are done. I have two little 110 compressors I use for running nail guns and stuff. They are portable and were a couple hundred bucks new. You can do a limited amount of painting with them in a pinch, but you would become very frustrated, very fast, trying to paint a vehicle with them. Even with a spare tank. I run a filter before my line regulator/water trap and an inline filter before the gauge on the gun. Always strain your paints and especially primers.

 

NEVER USE RATTLE CAN PRIMER!!!

 

I use PPG paints because they are quality, perform well in application and I can get colors and clears mixed easily from my supplier. PPG has an economy brand called OMNI, that is good stuff and a third to half the price. I have heard pro painters rip on OMNI, but I would not paint an expensive car with it. It is RATSUN quality for sure. A tip is to get more paint than you might use mixed because I ran out once or twice and the colors were not quit the same. That is not a problem with higher quality, more expensive PPG Deltron. OMNI two part epoxy primer works great for the price and I have used it on chrome bumpers, door handles windshield wipers that I wanted to spray with Rustoleum top coat. Two years of sitting outside and they look great. The OMNI MTK Acrylic Urethane is two part, paint, with a hardener. Two coats is good, three is nice and you can buff it out.

 

You can easily spend six, eight hundred or more on paint materials alone. When I painted my 620, I used PPG Deltron base/clear system. The good part is that it flashes off fast so you can fix dust nibs, sags and runs quickly. In fact, once you have sprayed two part epoxy primer, you must apply the color coat in 24 hours and then the clears too, so they bond right chemically. That is the reason behind the base/clear system, so that shops can do spot repairs fast. The problem with that is that the materials have a shelf life. Not the paints or reducers so much as the hardeners. Once you open them they will turn your expensive paint into cottage cheese after a couple months of sitting around.

 

The color coat is just that, color. It sprays like water, so you have to dust it on in two or three coats, until you achieve "hide". The trick is to not put to much on all at once or it will run and sag big time. The clear coats can be block sanded and rubbed out if needed. That is what you see that looks glossy. The color coats by themselves appear flat. If you get a ding or scratch, you just prep the little area, shoot primer on the repair, shoot color coat and clear the whole panel in a few hours. Clear coats generally look glossy like they were waxed. I used a matte clear that is so flat it looks like old school hot rod primer. People ask me if I painted it with a rattle can. No, the paint products alone were $850.

 

If you can let the vehicle sit for a while to dry, an acrylic enamel or acrylic urethanes are a good way to go. They flash off slowly and dry slowly unless you force dry them in an oven or with infra red lights. After two or three coats/days, you will have a tough durable finish that can be buffed out if you want them to look really nice. The thing I hate is that any runs, sags, dust nibs, insects can't be fixed in fifteen minutes. You have to wait for a day to dry. The trick is to dust some on and let it sit for a few seconds, then go back and apply a full wet coat. This is where experience and craftsmanship come into play. It's not that hard to paint just a fender or a hood. But to "walk" the side of a car and keep a wet edge and apply an even full wet coat with out runs or sags doesn't happen automatically. You can waste expensive material and make a horrendous mess very quickly. Even after spraying for years, maybe one out of four jobs goes off perfectly with out a hitch for me. You can snag a hose, bump the pot, have a low pressure sag around the corner of a fender or roof so easily.

 

When I went to paint my 620, I went to the library to get books on automotive refinishing and realized after I went to my auto paint supplier, that all the products had changed because of the clean air standards and VOC compliance. Maybe a dozen books were all full of obsolete and useless info.

 

It is expensive to paint yourself. But you can get a five or ten thousand dollar job for a grand in material and a maybe a grand in tools. In the long run it might be better to do all your body work, strip the parts that you have to, apply a quality epoxy primer and then use 2 to 4 coats of high build primer or primer/surfacer, block sanding between coats. Then the body is water proof and ready for what ever top coats you want to use whenever you get around to it. Epoxy primer alone is not water proof and if there is high humidity rust can start under the primer and it might cause paint failure in the long run.

 

At that point you could do all the masking, then take it to a shop with a booth and let them apply the top coats. Fuck Maaco and duke of Earl. It can't be that hard to find a small paint shop locally that will spray color for you cheap if you do all the prep. Find somebody that will talk to you and help you decide what strategy to use to get the biggest bang for the buck. They can recommend the correct brand and type of paint system to use. Sherwin Williams, Dulux, ICI, Dupont, Etc.

 

I ended up painting my truck in a cold, small, dimly lit garage and it turned out OK, until you look at it up close or in the direct sun. I kind of wasted my time and money because it's should be show quality and it's not. It is holding up great parked outside in the rain and sun though and being a daily driver it already had rock chips and scratches. So it goes. If you have the the space, time and right tools, you can do it though. I didn't have enough time and it came back to bite me.

 

I could go on an on here. There is a lot to know and decide upon. Factors like, what kind of paint job are you looking for? Show quality, clean and serviceable daily driver, don't care what it looks like just that it is cheap and protects against rust?? How much time and space do you have to let the project sit?

 

I spent a lot of time trying to get info and I learned a lot by getting to know a couple of salesman at the automotive paint store. I did many searches on the web for DIY car painting info and read lots of books. 90% of the books in the library were old and out of date, virtually useless. I got a great paper back book by a guy named Tom Brownell used for $12 called How to Restore Your Collector Car, 1999.

 

The next day I was in Baxter's/Shucks auto store and found the hot-set-up book in my opinion. $18.00 It is by Tom Brownell, DO-IT-YOURSELF GUIDE TO CUSTOM PAINTING, 2000. It has all the modern materials and methods described and has good photos too. I highly recommend you read it before you spend a dime.

 

Good Luck...

 

My link

 

My link

 

Dude how long did you take typing all that? lol power to ya

[72240z]

does anyone use a line dryer for paint on their home compressor?

or anything to keep the moisture out. (besides a second tank)

 

I built one at my old shop out of one of those hotel refrigerators. Run a copper coil through it with a collector tank/auto drain in line. Works like a charm for hours and hours and hours.

 

Some people just drop a copper coil into ice water. That works but not for very long.

[City Hunter]

I did a car with a cheapo craftmans style 110 oilless 33g vertical compressor without any issues.