How to Clean a Spray Gun

If you want your spray gun to keep working well it's really important that you keep it nice and clean. It's all about housekeeping here. Remember that if polyurethane dries on your gun it's like having plastic dried on here. You're going to have a very hard time getting it off. Lacquer and shellac are a little bit more forgiving because they're solvents. Lacquer, thinner and denatured alcohol will always loosen those products up and you can probably recover your gun. But you never, ever, ever want to let polyurethane get dry. It's better to just do a good cleaning every time, regardless of what you're spraying. That way, you know, next time you pick up the gun it's gonna be good to go. First step is easy now, 'cause I got water in here just to show you what I'm doin', not worried about having that mask on. So, for a first step, load your cup with solvent. Spray just like you were spraying finish. What that's gonna do is it's going to run solvent through all those parts. It's gonna loosen everything up, make sure that internally we've got everything nice and clean. Once you're done with that, then we want to do some disassembly. So let me get these parts off. Now we're done with our cup on top. So I'm gonna pour solvent out, whatever's left, in this case, like I said, it's water for this demonstration. Now I'm gonna start on the tip here. I'm gonna start by taking the air cap off. Remember the job of the horns on that air cap is to control your fan. So we wanna keep those little holes, those tiny, tiny orifices nice and clean. So they have air go through 'em. Now I've got a can full of solvent here. Here's the easiest way to deal with this. Bloop. That way that can just sit in that solvent and soak. The fluid nozzle is next. Our fluid's coming down, flowing out through this. So we're going to pop that off of there. It's a great opportunity too, to see the inside of the gun, see how everything works. So we've got some tiny holes here. That's where the fluid comes through. So again, we wanna make sure that stays nice and clean, so that the fluid can flow. Guess what I'm going to do to clean that? Now this is the needle that will seat into the back of that fluid nozzle. So we've got lacquer or polyurethane, shellac coming over this all the time. We wanna get that nice and clean. That's got to come out the other end. So I'm going to open up my fluid control here. There's a spring behind it. Don't let that fall on the floor, 'cause they're good at going missing on ya. Gonna slide that out. Now there's some resistance to this 'cause it's going through a packing, that I'm gonna talk more about in a second. So we can pull that out. Now, it's really just the tip of this. That's exposed to our finish. So that can go in like that. Now, while I'm doing my other work on the gun that stuff can sit in the solvent for a little while and soak. It's gonna do a good job of getting it nice and clean. Now I just referred to that packing. What we want to do is make sure that we have all of those parts working well. So one of the things I'm gonna do is open up this nut, right behind the trigger. And once that's open, I'm gonna put just a drop or two of mineral oil inside there. So I've got the nut out of the way. Then I would get a little bit of mineral oil on the end of a Q-tip and I can drop that right down on there. That's gonna keep that lubricated. So that's gonna have us in good shape on the gun. With that work done. We'll be able to pull the parts back out of the solvent. Now, let's say that you've got some finish that's really sticking there. You're having a hard time getting it off. Never use metal parts to clean the components. So I'm gonna fish these up out of here. If we had some ornery finish here on the horns of our air cap, I would use a wooden toothpick and use that to clean those small orifices out. Never want to put metal into these carefully machine components 'cause you're gonna mess something up but a wooden toothpick will work great. So that'll get all these parts clean. Now this is that gravity feed style gun. If you have a siphon feed gun, a couple things that are just a little bit different. In order for fluid to get out, air has got to get in. So the siphon gun has an air inlet hole on the top of it. Sometimes those can get clogged. If that gets clogged you're not gonna have good air flow in. You're not gonna have good fluid flow out. So same thing here. We sometimes need to just take something and penetrate that air inlet hole in order to make sure that it stays nice and clean. Underneath the cap, couple issues there. Wanna make sure that the top of the cup stays nice and clean. And the bottom of the gasket stays nice and clean. We're expecting this to have a good seal between these two components. So if we have any kind of finished buildup on the top of this or the bottom of this, that's gonna stop 'em from coming together as well as they should. And when we lock this down, it's not gonna seal up very well. So housekeeping with your spray gun is very important. Easiest way to do this is just every time you're done, take care of the cleaning. Next time you use it, the gun's going to work as well as it can. You're gonna be good to go and get your finish on perfectly.