Gonna try my hand at spraying. Wish me luck!

[John Pollman]

Hi folks,

Other than using spray cans for my woodworking projects, the only real spraying I've done has been an R/C sailboat that I built a few years ago. It came out very nice. I used a cheap $25 spray setup I bought at Harbor Freight. But very soon I will have thirteen cabinets with doors and drawer fronts that need to be painted. Spraying is about the only logical way to accomplish the task. They are going to need at least four coats I'm sure. Two primer coats and two color coats.

I have built all of the cabinets and they are 1x poplar and Baltic Birch plywood. The plan is two coats of Zinsser BIN shellac-based primer, and two coats of white latex satin. I'm going to start with some practice spraying on scrap, and then the inside of the cabinets first to get the feel for it. I bought what should be a pretty nice HVLP gun. I got it again at Harbor Freight, but it is the most expensive one they carry. ($229) It has a 1.7 tip, and talking to my brother who has been spraying for years said that should be fine. It's a Black Widow and I watched a review of it on Youtube. A professional auto painter put it head to head against one of his top of the line guns he uses. He said that it did very well in the test. I'm sure that it should be fine for shooting cabinets.

Wish me luck!

 

[fred hargis]

I do wish you luck. I'll be very interested in hearing how it does with the top coats. Are you using a 100% acrylic latex?

 

[John Pollman]

I do wish you luck. I'll be very interested in hearing how it does with the top coats. Are you using a 100% acrylic latex?

More than likely.

 

[larry merlau]

the latex will need to be thinned and maybe a larger nozzle but if your brother has sprayed a lot listen to his advice.. the shellac will go on fine with a 1.7 nozzle only suggestion would be to use a smaller detail gun to get inside the cabinets. my advice would be to use water base lacquer for the white

 

[John Pollman]

From what I've read, the BIN should spray just fine unthinned. But the latex would definitely need to be thinned. I've got a good buddy who is a professional painter and does phenomenal work. I may just do the primer and maybe one coat of color, then have him come and spray the finish coat.

 

[larry merlau]

pay attention to how he does it and what tip and thinning he does, you can learn from watching and tell others what you learned. there seems to be a lot of interst in painted wood these days and i am sure others would like to know how to get threw it.

 

[Dan Noren]

Going to be giving it a try today as well. I have a similar gun as yours. My brother said to keep the outgoing from the compressor to 20 psi and 6 psi on the gun.