Building a Plastic Booth.
Will the structure collapse? Can I vent the area? How do I get in and out?
There are many questions when it comes to creating your own spray painting booth. Being open minded along the way will allow for a better workflow later. Your layout might change after you turn some vents on since the plastic walls tend to suck in and collapse. You also may need to reroute your airlines or electrical due to this problem as well. Location, location, location is key when creating a plastic spray booth.
If you are building your booth in a room with existing walls and ceiling then you can use that to your benefit. Using the existing ceiling to mount your wood to hang the plastic and lights from will be the best case to maximize and utilize space. Moving this booth next to a wall to mount airlines and have a hard wall to hang any shelves or hose reels will be ideal.
If you are creating this booth in a larger warehouse or outside where there is no ceiling low enough to utilize then creating a frame with PVC pipes and connectors can be a low cost solution for a frame to hold the plastic. Remember to make the booth big enough to fit what you will be painting and have enough room for you to also maneuver within the area.
Every situation and scenario is different. In this article I will demonstrate how I created a plastic spray booth in my basement.
For equipment, I went as basic and cost effective as possible. I searched high and low over the course of a few weeks for the best deals possible for the biggest things I needed. 60 gallon Dewalt compressor from tractor supply was $400 after tax since it was on sale and was the old floor model. I love buying floor model equipment from any and all stores. I have discovered I have saved an average of 85% OFF when I buy the just out of date floor models. I also bought my 12” dual bevel sliding mitre saw WITH a 550 lb stand for $250 total the same way and TWO 9000 watt generators for $500 total. Give it a search next time you need something big.
I started out by tapping my layout on the floor. The tapped layout on the floor allows me to see and also walk around in the rooms ill have before i build them. Yes, my plastic spray booth also has a paint room and a prep room as well. The plastic rooms also help keep the smell in from the paint on the shelves and the dust down when you use a DA to sand an entire bagger. My paint room also acts as my airbrushing room. This keeps the smell down when airbrushing and i can vent the room out when i sit and paint. The taped floor will also allow me to know where i want to put in my ‘doors’ to get from one room to another.
Hint* I use plastic zippers to make doors that can roll up so I can move large parts from one room to another from prep to paint.
Once I have my floor layout all figured out that would accommodate everything i'd like to use the rooms for, I then transferred the floor layout to the ceiling. I did this by screwing two-by-fours to the ceiling joists in the ceiling in the same shape as the floor design below. I mirrored the floor design on the ceiling. I also added a few more 2x4s in sections that I needed to reinforce the ceiling from where I would hang heavy parts to paint and the heavy enclosed air hose reel.
The ceiling originally had two ceiling fans in the sections I wanted to convert to a booth. After I removed the fans I was able to pull power from those junction boxes and add a few more receptacles inline to have power with reach and to plug in lights.
Before any walls went up I added the airline and air drops in all sections of each room and even in an extra prep area not in the plastic off areas. Basically I did a big circle around the perimeter of the entire booth and this allowed me to add a few airline drops in each room. I used a flexible PVC airline set up called RapidAir for ease of use but mainly because of the cost difference between running hard airlines of any kind. The entire airline set up from home depot (on discount) was less than 80 bucks. I did have to get extra air fittings from harbor freight to accommodate extra taps at each airdrop.
To get the fumes out when painting I used two 6” inline duct fans with 240 CFMs each. One fan was mounted to the exterior wall (that goes into a bucket of water outside) and the second fan was mounted to the ceiling and cut into the plastic side of the booth for exhausting the room. Each fan was connected with flexible 6” dryer vent foil ducting. Specifically using a dryer vent duct keeps the smells inside the ducting with its insulated walls.
For my booth walls I decided to go with a 12’ wide 100’ long 4 mil plastic. This will allow me to staple one side of the plastic to the 2x4s on the ceiling and the rest will be able to be tucked under my ‘floor’ later to create an airtight seal since the basement ceiling is just shy of 8’. I had to get 2 - 100’ rolls to do all the walls and also have enough to run a sheet of plastic across the ceiling to enclose the roof to the rest of the booth. I sealed up the gaps from the roof plastic to the wall plastic by taping the seams together with heavy duty duct tape, also creating that airtight seal.
Before the floor is installed I make sure to create my doors where they were taped off on the floor. Plastic zippers from home depot are used on each side of my doorways. The zippers get tapped to the plastic wall and then you simply cut where the zipper zips. This allows the zipper to stay stuck to the walls and give you a cut or slit in the plastic to get through the plastic from one side to the other. I take it a step further and apply two zippers for each door just as a door frame would have. I use the zippers on each side of the doors to then create roll up plastic doors when the zippers are zipped up. When the zippers are zipped down they keep all the smell and dust inside those rooms, it's incredible.
The key to this whole enchilada is the floor. When building a plastic booth and having some kind of ventilation you run into the problems of the walls being sucked in and collapsing on you and your projects. Taping large pieces of cardboard to the floor that cover the entire booth space serves two purposes.
1- It keeps your original floor clean along with also being able to be cleaned easily by letting overspray dry and simply sweeping up the dry dust later when cleaning up. Cardboard sweeps up nicely!
2- when covering the entire area with cardboard and taping the cardboard to the floor but also tucking that extra 4’ plastics under the cardboard that is tapped to the floor allows the plastic wall to be ridged with the tapped cardboard. The walls won’t collapse with everything stapled and taped to everything.
I've been running this setup constantly for over a year now and have had no issues with smells escaping or walls collapsing.
Please take a look at the pics and vids that follow my process.
Do you have a booth that you built? Please share it with us here!
Maybe this inspired you to start yours, if so, Good Luck! Let us know how it goes!
'Till next time!