Hi all,
I’m trying to decide what the best way is to get rid of dust that always ends up on my freshly painted subject. I have a paint booth, but the dust just gets drawn into it and can sometimes still get in my paint. My work shop is in my basement. I have a forced air heating system. This last summer I finished the basement, but there is still dust floating around. At the moment I’m considering two options.
Purchase a dust collecting system made by somebody like Delta or Jet. These run about $300
Install an electronic air cleaner for our furnace/air conditioner. These are about $700 installed. The advantage here might be helping the wife with alergies. But I’m not sure if it would be as effective as option number 1.
We have a elecronic air filter on our furnace. It doesn’t help that much. What I do is run my booth 10-15 minutes before a painting session, and just before I paint, use a spray bottle and mist some water around my booth to get rid of dust. Whatever dust may still get in can be poished out. Hope this helps. You’ll never get rid of all the dust, you can only cut down on what is around.
Dust tends to settle on horizontal surfaces more than vertical ones for obvious reasons. So I always try to paint my models in a vertical position. This has helped me quite a bit at home and at work.
I guess dust has never been that big of a problem. But when i am not working on a model i have it covered. Sometimes it is days in between chances to work on my models.
In my second-story apartment, I do a lot of brush-painting as I have no place for an airbrush (when I use a “rattle-can,” I go outside). I keep a lot of different-sized clean plastic containers around the workbench for keeping parts and sub-assemblies clean after painting. The tiniest parts go into one of those 7-day pill containers; somewhat larger parts go into a 4-compartment dip container rescued from my friend’s little boy’s birthday party. (The individual compartments are great; I don’t have to keep track of half-a-dozen 35mm film cannisters.) Still larger assemblies are placed under anything from a small plastic flower pot to a motel-room ice bucket. Believe it or not, one of the handiest things I’ve used is a hospital vomit tray (clean, of course!) that a respiratory therapist friend of mine once gave me! Its unusual kidney shape is great for fitting around large or awkwardly-shaped subassemblies. I don’t keep a super-clean house, so my apartment is not only dusty, but there’s a lot of cat hair, so I definitely need all those containers! (Incidentally, when you cover a fresh paint job with a container, prop up one end with a small piece of wood, a small book, or whatever, for ventilation.)
I found a cart at a discount store which has 4 shallow drawers and 2 deeper ones. I keep in-progress stuff in them, as well as paints. For smaller parts, sub-assemblies, etc. I recommend the disposable plastic containers by Glad and others, found at the supermarket near the plastic bags. I live in a place where the wind blows constantly, and a highway and a busy railroad are within 2 blocks of my house, so there is a constant flow of dust.