# Sprayer settings cookbook



## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

I think it would be a good idea to have a thread that allows painters to input what spray settings they use for a particular product.

First name the specific sprayer model,air pressure,fluid pressure,tip size,reduction,and other variables for a specific paint product.

Prime coat,base coat,top coat could also be added...Often times certain products are not compatible with each other..

This could be a valuable resource over the years that is frequently updated with new products and rigs.


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## Damon T (Nov 22, 2008)

Make it a sticky! That's a great idea!


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

Damon T said:


> Make it a sticky! That's a great idea!



i think it has the potential to be one of the most useful stickies on Painttalk.


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## benthepainter (Jun 17, 2011)

Xmark said:


> I think it would be a good idea to have a thread that allows painters to input what spray settings they use for a particular product.
> 
> First name the specific sprayer model,air pressure,fluid pressure,tip size,reduction,and other variables for a specific paint product.
> 
> ...



G'day Xmark

I think it's a great idea : ) as a spraying newbie I know I would take on board from the PT spraying guru's
As long as it doesn't turn into most PT threads my Tip is bigger than yours lol


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

From Paintcore.ca

Kemaqua:

We spray all our doors in our shop with a C.A. Tech 14:1 h20 with a bobcat gun for our primers and a kremlin eos 30:1 hooked up to a kremlin inline heater for our top coats. Heating the material is a must IMO. We keep the shop temp regulated at 65. We spray top coats with a 413 tip at 600 to 700 psi fluid and around 20 psi for air depending on the day. You have to learn to adjust with the coating. Once you learn the nuances you will know when to add retarder or thin depending on humidity and temp. The inline heater has taken a lot of the guess work out of it tho. On site we go totally turbine. Airless sucks for water bourn lacquers. We have used a multi finish and a finish pro with ok results. Hvlp is great for on-site and I swear we can lay down a finish as good as our kremlin dose on-site with our capspray. We use the 4 stage 9600 capspray. We have a 6 stage 115 but find it over atomize the coating when using the 6 stage so we only use it at 4. We use fuji, ca tech, and accuspray hvlp turbine guns on site. For hvlp we spray with a #3 or a 1.5 tip for top coats and surfaces and a 1.2 for pigmented shellac.

I have been using kremlins 09-094 which I think is a 413.


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

Bloodnut:


I have done the G40 to G15 conversion, best thing I have done with my AAA sprayer. I spray water based aqua enamel through it & more than happy with the finish, usually use 700-750 psi & 30 psi air.
Cheers Bloodnut


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## SprayerMiken125 (Jan 11, 2013)

This is why I joined PT to be honest. I am new to spraying my self, so I could ask and talk to pros that know there stuff insted of me being a Harry home owner.


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## Damon T (Nov 22, 2008)

Xmark said:


> From Paintcore.ca
> 
> Kemaqua:
> 
> ...


Is this for the Kem Aqua Lacquer or KA Plus? Thanks, great info! Also, when you say the #3 tip, is that in capspray sizing? .051"?


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## paintcore.ca (Apr 5, 2010)

Damon T said:


> Is this for the Kem Aqua Lacquer or KA Plus? Thanks, great info! Also, when you say the #3 tip, is that in capspray sizing? .051"?


It's for both kem aqua pigmented lacquer and kem aqua plus. Give or take a few psi depending on the day. When I spray clear I Chang tip to a 411. For kem aqua surfacer I use a 413. Here is a pic of kem aqua plus medium rubbed effect on maple.


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## paintcore.ca (Apr 5, 2010)

And the #3 is for a cap spray.


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## premierpainter (Apr 17, 2007)

Great results on that Maple. Tough to get a consistent finish on Maple
Nice work


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

paintcore.ca said:


> It's for both kem aqua pigmented lacquer and kem aqua plus. Give or take a few psi depending on the day. When I spray clear I Chang tip to a 411. For kem aqua surfacer I use a 413. Here is a pic of kem aqua plus medium rubbed effect on maple.
> 
> View attachment 14221


wow beautiful work man! dean will luv this because he's had some trouble spraying clears. what temp do you heat it to and do you add Glycol ether or another retarder to stop the micro bubbling?


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

Greg Saunders:

Thinning and retarding water based lacquers and coatings
There are a few tips to thinning and retarding water based materials that are common to most all of the water based materials on the market today, knowing these tips can make spraying out water base materials easy fun and most importantly give you the control over the flow of the materials so you compensate for the varying conditions of your environment.

One of the things to be aware of with water based materials is that they are temperature and humidity sensitive, meaning that on a cold and rainy day it will take forever to dry if left wit out forced air and some heat.

The obvious and wonderful characteristic about water based materials is that you can thin them with water; water is cheap and not explosive. No one has ever accidentally blown up their shop with a bucket of water. That being said you can overthin with water and that can create a mess.

Before we get into percentages and how much you should thin, one thing you should know is that the warmer the materials are, the thinner they will be. This is true of both water base and solvent materials. Heating pads, bucket heaters and in line material heaters are all things that you can implement. Inline materials heaters are pricey and not something that are too common here in Southern California but can be used. More commonly and more practically you can just keep your buckets off the concrete floor or move the bucket in to the office of the shop overnight if it’s cold out. Warming up water base is easier and safer than warming up the solvent materials and in fact with some water base materials you can even warm them up in the microwave machine, a little impractical but not impossible. For every 10 degrees you heat the material you will reduce the Viscosity by 10% . And that is a good thing to know because you can reduce your labor by putting on a thicker coat save our self the labor of having to put on another one of or two more sometimes

Now onto the more practical, the first thing that you should do is adjust your equipment to the material in other words if you have been spraying lacquer with an extra fine airless it’s probably going to be too small an orifice for the water base; you don’t want to overthin it so that you can get it out of your gun but rather get a bigger tip. Generally a 1.7 mm tip in a cup gun and or something no smaller than a .014 in an airless and that would be the smallest I recommend 1.8 or a 2.0mm tip and needle for a cup or gravity gun.

When you do need to thin the materials down I start out with about 5% water and see how it’s coming out of the gun and laying down, with water based a good heavy coat is what you want if it looks a little blue you are doing good. You want it heavy enough to flow out but obviously not so heavy that it is running.

Ok the next thing is getting it to flow out and lay down smoothly if it has any orange peel to it then you need some retarder. I generally add the retarder whether I need it or not as I like that fact that it flows out better, this might not be true of all water bases but the ones I have used it just seems to work better with the proper amount of retarder.

Glycol ether is the solvent for retarding water based material you can also use that for retarding regular solvent lacquers If you use too much your coating will never dry. The other thing to know is that you can add the retarder too fast and “shock” the material. Shocking information, but true. Dump the retarder directly in to your pot and it can cause itto foam up and have an adverse reaction. Some chemicals go together easily and some don’t; then there are others that are right on the boarder, this in one of those. So the best way to add the retarder is to mix it 50/ 50 with water first and then add that into the water based lacquer while stirring it. Start out with one to two percent of the 50/50 water retarder solution and see if that doesn’t do the trick for you. You can go as high as about 4%. If you are working with pigmented water base materials then you can go up to 7% .

White and pigmented lacquers require more and will have a tendency to “mud Crack” (Mud cracking is the phenomena whereas the material dries it begins to crack like mud drying out) if you don’t use the retarder, what is happening is the solvents are drying out of the pigment faster than the pigment is drying and so you need to slow the process down so that they all dry and flow together.

Not all retarders are the same, some companies sell retarders that are a combination of different things, these work well for solvent lacquers but not always for water based materials. You either want a lacquer retarder that is made and marked for Water based materials OR you have to test them. The way you test your normal run of the mill retarder to see if it will work in your waterbased system is to mix it with water. Simple, if it mixes in you’re good If it separates and doesn’t mix in or foams up and looks weird then its not going to work. There are a few manufactures that have acetone in their retarder which doesn’t mix well with water If you add that to your water based lacquer its trash.

Ok I hope this information is clear and to the point. Use it and let me know what you get. Leave comments on the blog posting for others to see. I have specifically kept this report completely generic so that if you have a product that you are trying out for the first time it is generally best to contact the manufacture and ask them what they recommend, the better companies will spend the time to answer your questions others won’t


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

Greg Saunders:

Spray gun Tip Sizes

The following is the complete article on the subject of spray tip sizes as written by Phil Stevens, I have received their permission to reprint this article , Phil is a founding member of AWFI, American Wood Finishing institute, and has trained thousands of people on the Correct technology of finishing, including myself. I took a Finishing course put on by AWFI out here in southern california and came away from the training very skilled. If you ever have the opportunity to do their training program it is well worth the investment. 

Having toiled over correct tip sizing with different manufactures I stumbled across this article while getting a Kremlin set up for a customer the article answered my questions clearly and concisely so rather than spending the time to re write Phil’s article I decided to plagiarise it completely (with permission ) and give the credit where credit was due.

Choosing the correct tip and gun set-up for your spray equipment can be very confusing. The overwhelming number of tip sizes, set-up options and differing nomenclature between the equipment manufacturers often leads to finishing problems as a result of using the wrong size of tip.
U.S. manufacturers often use thousandths of an inch to designate the size of the tip. However, many U.S. manufacturers also use millimeters to classify tip size on some of their equipment. This is especially true when specifying HVLP spray gun set-ups. Other non-U.S. manufacturers use millimeters and other types of nomenclature that does not refer to either millimeters or thousandths of an inch. Here are some of the common nomenclature definitions used for some of the spray equipment manufacturers that are used in the wood finishing industry.

Graco
Graco air assisted airless tip sizes: A “512” tip is read as if the first number (5) is doubled to equal 10, which designates the spray pattern width of a minimum of 10 in. wide at a distance of 12 in. from the end of the tip. The second and third number – or in this example, the 12 – represent the tip opening size as 0.012/in. Therefore, if your tip is a “614” number, it would be a 12-in. fan pattern and a 0.014 tip opening.

Graco HVLP and conventional guns are designated as either millimeter or thousandths of an inch or both on the gun set-up size.

Kremlin
Kremlin air assisted airless tip sizes: A “09 -114” – the first number of “09” designates the orifice opening size of the tip, however, the “09” does not refer to either thousandths of an inch or millimeters. It is a numbering system that Kremlin uses to define the orifice size opening. A “06” number is a smaller orifice opening than as “09”. A “12” tip would be larger than a “09”. A “06” equals approximately 0.011/inch. A “09” equals approximately 0.013/inch. A “12” tip equals approximately 0.015/inch. The second set of numbers after the dash refers to the fan pattern width in degrees of arc. A “114” equals 114 degrees of arc in the width of the fan pattern. Therefore, a “94” will be narrower than a “114”. A “134” will be significantly wider than a “114”.

Kremlin HVLP spray gun nomenclature normally uses millimeters to designate tip sizes. Therefore, a 1.0mm tip will be smaller than a 1.5mm.

Binks
Binks air assisted airless tip sizes: For a “114 – 01310”, the “114” designates a standard flat tip. The first three numbers after the dash (“013”) equals thousandths of an inch or 0.013/in. in this example. The last two numbers, or the number “10” in this example, designates a fan pattern width of 10 in. at a distance of 12 in. from the end of the tip. If the tip starts with a “9 – 1311F”, the “9” and the “F” designate that it is a fine finishing tip with a pre-orifice. The tip would have a 0.013/in. orifice opening and an 11 in. fan pattern at a distance of 10 in. from the tip.

Binks HVLP spray gun nomenclature uses gun set-up numbers that must be referenced from their literature to determine their size. Most often they will be referenced with both millimeter and thousandths of an inch.
DeVilbiss
DeVilbiss standard spray guns, HVLP guns and trans-tech guns use millimeters to define the size of the tip and gun set-up.

What size tip is right for your application process?
Tip sizes will vary greatly, depending on the types of material sprayed, the viscosity of the coating, how much material needs to be applied (flow rate), whether it is pressure-fed, siphon-fed or gravity-fed and whether the application is manual vs. automatic spray.

For very low viscosity spray-to-color stains using HVLP gravity-fed spray guns, a 1.2mm to 1.4mm tip will work well. For pressure-fed HVLP guns spraying spray-to-color stains, a 1.0mm to 1.2mm set-up will normally be the range used for tip size. If you are spraying the same material with automated spray HVLP, a 0.08mm to 1.0mm tip size is recommended.

For spraying spray-to-color materials that are slightly higher in viscosity, such as a shader, an HVLP gun normally will work well if the tip size is increased by 0.2mm to 0.4mm for all of the above technologies.
Wiping stains spray best with air assisted airless technology. We recommend using a 0.06 to0 .094 tip size for Kremlin equipment; for all other manufacturers, a 0.28mm or a 0.009 tip orifice size will be adequate. An 8-in. fan pattern width is an average size for applying wiping stains. Larger or smaller pieces require a larger or narrower fan pattern width.

For solids, sealers and clear coats, an air assisted airless gun is recommended. Tip orifice opening size should equal around 0.013/inch. For Kremlin, this would equal a “09” tip. Pattern width of the tip generally ranges from 6 to 12 in. depending on the width of the parts. A wide fan pattern will often provide a more uniform coat with less runs and sags; however, a narrow tip will ensure higher transfer efficiency on narrower parts. Therefore, an average tip size for Kremlin would be a “09 – 114”; for Graco, a “513”; for Binks, a “114 – 01310”.

For heavy bodied primers and glazes, a 0.015 tip or larger on an air assisted airless gun will generally provide a flow rate necessary for these materials. For Kremlin, this would equal a “12 – 114”; for Graco, a “515”; and for Binks, a “114 – 01510”.

For water-based coatings, use the tip and gun set-up recommended by the equipment manufacturer that is specifically designed for water-based materials. These guns and tips are specifically designed to spray water-based coatings without causing shear on the material. We would recommend that you start with the same tip sizes for solvent-based coating. If you are experience problems with micro-foam or bubbles in the finish, you may need to try a larger or smaller tip on a trial and error basis to insure the best result is achieved with the type of water-based coatings you are using. Not all water-based materials are created equal; therefore, an exact recommendation for these materials cannot be offered.

Conclusion
When choosing the correct tip sizes, always take into consideration the following:
Does the stain have a heavy load of pigment? If so, a larger tip may be required.
Is the stain made with only dye colorants? If so, a smaller tip may be best for this type of stain application.
The solvent package of the coating: what is the solvent blend composition and does the material have a fast or slow flash-off rate? This will influence the tip size and gun set-up.
Viscosity of the coating: a larger or smaller tip may be necessary to most efficiently apply the coating depending on the density of the material.
The speed of spray application: Always try to select the tip that delivers the correct amount of material for the speed of application while maintaining the desired finish quality.
If you choose the correct tip size for the job, your finish will look better, you will reduce rework, will experience of spray operator comfort, and will increase the efficiency of the coating application.

Greg Saunders,Annex Paint


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## paintcore.ca (Apr 5, 2010)

premierpainter said:


> Great results on that Maple. Tough to get a consistent finish on Maple
> Nice work


I find the trick with maple is giving it a light wash coat. I reduce blond shellac 1 ounce to 10 ounces of alcohol. Spray a mist coat and that evens out the porosity of maple. I even add a dye concentrate to that mixture some times to get my undertone. Then wipe down with BAC stain. This gives a super even look on maple and also pops the grain.


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## premierpainter (Apr 17, 2007)

Man, if you lived around me, you would make a lot of $$ We subbed out a new Library to a guy and he charged $22,000 to do the work. Frankly, your work looks better than his. Will you come to NJ for future work?


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

paintcore.ca said:


> I find the trick with maple is giving it a light wash coat. I reduce blond shellac 1 ounce to 10 ounces of alcohol. Spray a mist coat and that evens out the porosity of maple. I even add a dye concentrate to that mixture some times to get my undertone. Then wipe down with BAC stain. This gives a super even look on maple and also pops the grain.


is their a book that teaches you how to apply all the new WB finishes? most of the books recommended by woodworkers are old school and outdated.


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## paintcore.ca (Apr 5, 2010)

premierpainter said:


> Man, if you lived around me, you would make a lot of $$ We subbed out a new Library to a guy and he charged $22,000 to do the work. Frankly, your work looks better than his. Will you come to NJ for future work?


If the money is there I'm down. I can land in Newark in a hour or so. I love porter airlines. Lol


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## paintcore.ca (Apr 5, 2010)

Xmark said:


> is their a book that teaches you how to apply all the new WB finishes? most of the books recommended by woodworkers are old school and outdated.


I haven't found a book yet on WB. It is the way of the future. Somebody will write one soon enough.


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## Damon T (Nov 22, 2008)

I found this reference online for Titan capspray set ups. I like the conversions from inches to mm. 


#2 Projector Set 0.8mm/.031" 0276254 Light Viscosity Materials, Nitrocellulous Lacquer, Stain, Varnish

#3 Projector Set 1.3mm/.051" 0276227 Medium Viscosity Materials, Production Lacquers, Shellac, Industrial Enamel, Quick Dry Enamel, Alkyd, Water-based Alkyd, Polyurethane, Sealer, Water Base Epoxy, Latex Primer

#4 Projector Set 1.8mm/.070" 0276228 Medium Viscosity Materials, Same products as #3 plus Multi-latex, Multi-color

#5 Projector Set 2.2mm/.086 0276229 High Viscosity Materials, Same as #4 needle plus heavier bodied latexes, adhesives, gels

#6 Projector Set 2.4mm/.094" 0276245 High Viscosity Materials, Same as #5 but heavier bodied latexes, gels and adhesives


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

Damon T said:


> I found this reference online for Titan capspray set ups. I like the conversions from inches to mm.
> 
> 
> #2 Projector Set 0.8mm/.031" 0276254 Light Viscosity Materials, Nitrocellulous Lacquer, Stain, Varnish
> ...


Hey Damon,

Let's try to get this thread to "stick" around.

Could you provide the product (primer + topcoat) and sprayer settings from your last cabinet job?..You use a 6 stage HVLP,correct?


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## Damon T (Nov 22, 2008)

Thanks Xmark

I typically post the settings and whatnot when I post a pic or update, but happy to relay that here as well. 
On the last cabinet job which was a small one I posted on the picture section I was going over a previously coated catalyzed lacquer pigmented and clear topcoat. I used Stix primer, thinned about 10% or slightly less with water. Shot with the Titan 115 set on 6 stage. Had the air all the way up, and then brought up the fluid to where I liked the fan and volume. Played with the fluid setting as I was changing the different profiles etc. would open up the fan at the aircap or close down as needed, but generally did more of the control with the fluid needle. 
I have been shooting the acrylics both primer and topcoats with my #5 setup lately. It seems to work better than the #4 for me, which is also what the Titan rep suggested. 
I shot the topcoat with BM Advance satin, also thinned up to 10%. I shot two coats, and due to logistics I ended up giving them overnight between coats. I have recoated Advance within an hour of shooting without any problems, again with the same setup. 










Here's a pic of wainscot that I shot 2nd coat within an hour of first coat with Advance semigloss.


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## CarolinaNomad (Feb 15, 2013)

Bump :notworthy:

Thanks for the great information. This will help me reduce the setup time and improve my results. I definitely need to look into a bucket heater or an inline heater.


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## Xmark (Apr 15, 2012)

CarolinaNomad said:


> Bump :notworthy:
> 
> Thanks for the great information. This will help me reduce the setup time and improve my results. I definitely need to look into a bucket heater or an inline heater.


please add your 2 cents once you have completed your next project.


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