Making Your Own Spray Booth for Coating Prints, with Dan Johnson | LexJet Blog
BEGIN TYPING YOUR SEARCH ABOVE AND PRESS RETURN TO SEARCH. PRESS ESC TO CANCEL

Making Your Own Spray Booth for Coating Prints, with Dan Johnson

How to make your own studio sized spray boothYou may remember Dan Johnson from such LexJet Blog posts as, Night and Day: Flowing City Panorama Printed on Satin Cloth, and the ArtPrize competition in Grand Rapids, Mich., Dan’s hometown. Dan recently called in and told me he had been searching for a way to spray coat his canvas prints, but lack of space at his studio, Dan Johnson Photography, was his nemesis. So, Dan went searching for a way to build his own space-saving spray booth. Here’s what Dan, in his own words, found…

“So we have always wanted to be able to spray our Sunset Select Matte Canvas prints with LexJet’s Sunset Satin Coating instead of rolling it on, but did not think we had the room for an actual spray booth in our small studio. After some thought, we took a small space and made it happen.

We had some storage shelves in the studio that were not all full. After moving some of the shelves up and down we were able to create a large enough space to build a booth large enough for us to spray a 40″ x 40″ print (see the photos). Here are the details of the booth:
2 clamp lights, $12.32
40×46 pegboard, $7.52
4×8 sheet of 1/2″ OSB, $7.97
36″ dowel, $2.44
Surge protector, $8.97
Wood glue, $1.98
2 clamps we already had, $0.00
Wagner professional spray gun $23.60 (on clearance)
Total price, $68.69 (without ventilation unit)

The great employees at Lowe’s gladly cut my plywood down to size for me at no charge. I took the parts home and with some glue and a brad nailer we had it put together in about half an hour.

The most expensive part of the booth was a ventilation unit that we purchased afterwards from eBay.  This unit – an Artograph 1530 spray booth system for about $340 – vacuums in most of the overspray. We did not install the top part of the unit. Instead, we flipped it over and it rests on a shelf above our booth facing down into the booth. We probably could have done it without this, but it does help contain the spray.

Now we coat prints in about half the time with less mess and better results. Nice!”

Regan has been involved in the sign and wide format digital printing industries for the past two decades as an editor, writer and pundit. With a degree in journalism from the University of Houston, Regan has reported on the full evolution of the inkjet printing industry since the first digital printers began appearing on the scene.

0 Comments

  1. http://vinsanity.com/page/3/

    I found that having some plastic to enclose the spray area was helpful; I did it WAY cheap with a cardboard Canon IPX8300 box (from LexJet of course.)

  2. David Owens

    Nice setup. But, I tried a similar setup and the 370 cfm ventilation fan mentioned above (Artograph 1530) is vastly underpowered for this application. So much so I could turn the fan off and not notice a difference – no exaggeration. Not exactly sure how Dan is spraying but, in all fairness, my test was to spray a couple of 24×30 canvas prints and the Fuji spray gun was attached to a commercial grade Fuji Q4 HVLP turbine unit. The prints look good but the result was way too much fine over spray mist floating around my smallish camera room.

Leave a comment

Please be polite. We appreciate that. Your email address will not be published and required fields are marked