Airless Sprayers in Your Shop

As woodworkers for the most part what we hear about are HVLP type sprayers that we would use for spraying top coats on woodworking projects, but airless sprayers like this also have a place in your shop if you're doing what are called paint grade projects. Paint grade projects would be maybe something that you built out of MDF or Poplar, and instead of staining and top coating it your plan all along is to paint it. Happens all the time. The airless sprayers like this are really really good at getting on a layer of paint. They're not so good at doing top coat. So here's where we've got here. With this one the way it works is that we're not providing air to the system as would come from a compressor or a turbine we're providing electricity to it. There's a pump inside here. When we run this, when I squeeze the trigger the pump is going to pull liquid up out from the pot down here, push it out the nozzle. They work really really well for thick bodied stuff like paint. So that's kind of the line in the sand. If you're spraying polyurethane, lacquer, shellac you really are better off with an HVLP gun that you would run on an air compressor or a turbine. If you want to spray paint, because it's so thick you're better off with an airless like this. So here's what we've got goin', this particular one is a two speed gun. So I can change the speed setting here, which is affected by the viscosity, the thickness, of the liquid I'm spraying. Right now I've just got water in here. So it'll come out just fine on that low speed setting. I can also turn this knob and I can control the amount of fluid that comes out the front. I can turn this and I can control whether I have a vertical fan or a horizontal fan, so it gives me better control. Let me show you, I'll run a little bit of water through this thing and you can see and hear what it's like to use an airless sprayer. It's really throwing a big volume of liquid out. Now I think you can imagine that if this were lacquer or polyurethane I was spraying onto my woodworking projects, it just wouldn't work out very well. When this is paint that's coming out, this is a beautiful thing to have. It does a wonderful job of putting paint on your projects. Airless is the way to go, if paint is what you need to spray.