How to use the spray gun for furniture finishing 1

Spray gun now is still the most popular equipment for finishing materials applications in furniture finishing. Spray gun is equipment that can atomize the finishing materials and direct the finishing material to the desired surface in one operation. It is very flexible equipment, easy to manage, and produces the best coating results. No other equipment can give the smooth surface, evenly distributed finishing material with the high flexibility as the spray gun. 

 the air spray gun

There are many types of spray guns that can be used in furniture finishing (find more at our previous article the types of spraying equipment.) But when we talk about the technique to use the spray gun, then we can start to use the air spray gun as the starting point. As the discussion base, we use the air spray gun, the simplest and the first discovered spray gun. The air spray gun is the equipment with the most adjustable tool. Then we can use the right technique of using an air spray gun to run the other types of spray gun.

There are 2 main things that must be considered when we handle the spray gun, which are how to adjust the equipment and how to move the spray gun. Both 2 things need to be done in the correct way to minimize the wasting the finishing material and to give a good coating result.

How to set the air spray gun

setting for spray vertically

Air spray gun has 4 things that can be adjusted as follows: the width of the material spreading, the material spray direction, the volume of the finishing materials, and the air pressure that flows in the spray gun that is used to atomize the material. The simple rule in the equipment adjustment is that we need to get the perfect atomized material with even material flow with the minimum air pressure. 
The finishing material adjuster is set to make the finishing material able to fulfill the entire "fan spray" evenly. The air pressure setting is set at the lowest possible pressure, which is sufficient to produce a perfect atomization of the finishing material. Wide fan spray is set to adjust according to the width of the surface to be coated, while the direction of the fan spray is set vertically or horizontally depending on the most easily movement of the spray gun carried out to coat the targeted areas.

setting for spray horizontally

Setting the air pressure on the spray gun is very important because it will greatly affect the efficiency of the material transfer in the application. The higher the pressure used, the lower the transfer efficiency of material obtained. For more details, see the example of the following data:

Air pressure	Efficiency of materials transfer
3 bar	45 %
4.5 bar	35 %
6 bar	25 %

The table shows that the higher the air pressure used, the lower the efficiency of material transfer becomes. Therefore, the air pressure used should be set at the lowest to get the highest material transfer efficiency. But of course the air pressure cannot be too low, because if the pressure is too low, it will make atomization of the material that is not perfect. The imperfect atomization will result in the orange peel or uneven coating layer.