I have chased around the possibility of painting my '41 chevy in the shop. One thing that is on my mind is my compressor system. i have no doubt its a big enough compressor (80-gallon, 3-cylinder Husky). My concern is my piping. I have 3/4" black steel pipe out to the air reel. A couple years a go a robber line let go, and the compressor run all day, essentially burning up. I replaced the compressor head, but I fear there is oil in the piping. Is it possible to filter that out at the outlet, before the gun? -VOH
Outside of a moisture separator and a filter on your gun, I would spray a couple of test panels so see how they turn out. A blow gun, blowing into a clean white rag should give you any indicators of what's cooling out of your air
With the cost of paint and the trouble to correctly prep a car, wouldn't it be easier to fit new lines just fit for paint work? I wouldn't chance a dirty line Fn up my paint job.
Fuck i was taught to put a couple of drops of oil in my paint cup to help eliminate fisheye way back when! If you're concerned enough to ask, nobody is gonna tell you that it'll be OK
After retiring as an automotive and industrial painter I wanted to outfit my home shop/garage with a simple but effective and fairly cheap supply of clean, dry air for painting, blasting and other uses. I listened and followed the advise of one of my former co-workers and built this system in a single day and it has performed flawlessly for several years now. I can't take credit for the design or ideas. I just copied a friends system. Any compressor such as yours will have oil eventually saturate the air supply lines unless measures are implemented to prevent or remove it. I wanted two separate lines splitting from the compressor. One with dry, oil less air for blasting, painting etc. and one for air tool use. In the first pic you cannot see my compressor as it is on the other side of the wall in a separate outside enclosure which is semi sound proofed, located on the north side and always shaded. A rubber supply line isolates any vibrations and brings the air into the garage. I used 3/4" type L copper lines (much more mass for cooling) to construct the cooling tower lines. Any oil or condensate water will drop down the lines and out of the air supply. After a day of blasting and running the compressor all day I never get any moisture past the second upright. I do have moisture bottles and a desiccant filter downstream but nothing ever reaches that far. There are drain valves at the bottom of each upright as well as the compressor tank drain. Just tossing out a long term solution to a common problem. If you need to rely on a clean dry, oiless system, this may help. It's nothing elaborate but it works very well. Never get oil or a single drop of water. Good luck!
Running a compressor open for hours is actually the way you break in a compressor. As long as it has oil it should be fine but you should have an oil and water separator on your lines for painting before a regulator, I like at least one drop/drip line about 18" long at least 3 feet from the compressor and have the line rise 3" per 20' from that point. Don't forget to install a drain valve at the end of the drip.
I built this, it does 3 things, cools the air before it hits the tank, collects any moisture that the air drops while cooling and collects any oil out of the compressor head before it hits the tank. It drops the air temp 100° so my tank never feels hot. Then I run a big moisture trap before it runs into my main line. Then I run a small moisture trap at the end of the main line on the section I paint with and my paint air hose actually plugs into my small moisture trap. Did this a year ago and no moisture has made it to the small trap yet. .
Before I got “educated”, we just loaded the #7 and shot it in the middle of the shop. Wiped it down with gas Finest sandpaper we had was 400 Wet the floor down, draped some plastic over the tools Letter rip
Did several with the way you described anthony!! other than I did spring for some wax and grease remover instead of gas. The last one I did was black on a chevy HHR, it turned out awesome, can't post pics as it's OT but the people that owned it asked if I knew someone that allowed me to use their paint booth. It lasted a week before their 16 yr old daughter ended thru a steep ditch, and barbed wire fence and hedge row, scratched the crap out of the paint but none of it turned loose from the base metal. Should have put it together with velcro.... would have made it easier to fix if they had decided too.... .
Put a cap full of transmission fluid in a gallon of paint. Set the paint on a hot plate to warm it up. Watch the old painter at the shop smoke a cig as he fogged up the “paint booth” Id step outside and wait for the box fans mounted in the windows to pull out the fumes. I’ve noticed the more expensive/fancy the paint is, the more prep and cleaning it needs to work I feel the urge to stop overthinking this crap. Shoot some lacquer primer, sand it with 320 and let the enamel fly
It isn't that it needs more preparation to work it's that if you're spending $1000 a gallon for your color your expectations are going up as well. Back in my younger days I painted quite a few cars in my garage with a box fan in the window and a row of furnace filters at the bottom of the garage door and it worked good. I didn't have a lot of air flow so things stayed clean. Back then I wet sanded everything and finished with a wash so I'm sure prep had something to do with it.
I'll tell ya how it goes for me, the less I try to do perfect paint work, the better things turn out! Lol
@A 2 B , Top of your picture is really dark. I'm guessing that the first two uprights have a loop connecting them at the top. Then there is a Tee connection between the second and third tubes close to the bottom followed by another loop at the top of three and four. Drain valves at the bottoms of all four. A Tee toward the bottom of the fourth feeds your spray gun or tools, right? Pretty ingenious. I have a small compressor but, I don't use a lot of air in the shop. When I do need air, I wonder if I could use this hooked up to my gas powered 11CFM Ingersoll-Rand wheelbarrow job site compressor? I could leave the compressor outside and run a hose to the condenser. What do you think? Anybody?
My cooling tower kind of disappeared into what I call the 'Wall of WTF' so I made a crude sketch of what it consists of. Just customize it to suit your needs. My garage is climate controlled. In one of the pics you can see a vent fan sending air from the garage into the outside compressor enclosure. Best thing I ever did. I can hear my radio now, the compressor is fed conditioned air which I believe has to help with the moisture levels and I gained some space in my small garage.
Check out the shop. Small, probably had some hand tools, a jack and a torch Makes me ashamed of myself dragging my feet cause something wasn’t just quite the way it needed to be
Oh yeah, I remember places just like that! And there were guys like me who kept all their tools in the trunk of their car. I did house calls repairing and painting cars from the local dirt track. Wrecked on Saturday night and back in action, kinda straight and shiny by next Wednesday night. Today, most everyone leans toward being a perfectionist. I remember how happy my Dad was because he found a few flaws in the paint at the dealership and got $40.00 knocked off the selling price. He wasn't a perfectionist but liked saving a few bucks. LOL
Hey there Alan, In my opinion this whole thread talks about compressors and air hose and all that stuff is just way too complicated and way too much effort. I used an HVLP Turbine paint system, a good one is made by Fuji and features a 5 stage turbine that provides clean dry air and no drama with all that compressor stuff. I have a similar system with a Fuji spray gun and I painted my 26 RPU in my home built spray booth built from 2x4s and poly. I used 2 part single stage urethane (Washington Blue) I’m not a painter and this was my first time. The details are in my build thread as well as in another thread I started titled Painting at home in the driveway or garage.
https://ardec.ca/en/p/681/q5-platinum-hvlp-system https://fujispraysystems.com/q5/ These HVLP turbine systems are great and they are very easy to use.
My uncle had a 49 Ford that was tan and he painted it shiny brown with a brush in the driveway, I remember going over to look at it and saying it looked like crap (I got in trouble for saying crap) but the thing I liked was the Monarch butterfly stuck to the hood. I was about seven or eight.
Well, Voh's original question was regarding possible oil contamination in his black pipe. Simple answer is replace pipe. Also I was always taught that copper pipe was a big no no for air lines, but that's not the point. The main thing I was told when I built my first shop was to T off from the compressor with one pipeline pointed down with a shut off vale at the bottom. The other end goes toward the ceiling and then elbow at ceiling and run pipe preferably 20 feet at least with an upward pitch. At the other end elbow down and at about 3 ft from the floor T off so that you can put another down tube drain. From the T add a ft or two side run into a water Seperator filter/air regulator. This allows condensed moisture and residue to be drained from the lines at any time. I have two air drops in my booth and have oil separator/water trap/ desiccant dryers on both. I hate dragging a hose all over the booth, so I switch hoses as needed. I have 4 air drops with drains and water filter /regulators as well out in the shop plus I have 2 80 gal /4cylinder air compressors, and everything is drained down every night at quitting time. A bit over kill, but no oil or water issues. Larry
Oil contamination is the main reason I built the expansion chambers to go between my compressor head and tank, I don't have to worry about oil in my tank. The copper tube comes out of the head and does a few coils then into a 3/4" black pipe that goes about 5/8 all the way to the bottom of the bigger 1-3/4" tube on the outside. The air then goes back up to the top to cross over into the other pipe. Again the 3/4" black pipe is about 5/8 down the bigger pipe. Both big pipes have drain valves on each side. Most of the water and what little oil comes out of the first side, not much makes it past there. So if I can stop the oil and water before it hits my tank I've won most of the battle right there. The only thing I would change is I would move the head relief valve to one of the copper tubes on the the big tubes. .
The Jalopy Journal
