Instant Finishing Room

[twistsol]

When we moved from the country to the suburbs, I lost my shop and had to build a new one in the basement. The basement shop is a bit bigger than the my old one, and the basement shop has A/C and plumbing so all around a solid win. What I lost was my dedicated finishing space I recently took a hit to the SawStop savings because my planer died, so I ended up reallocating the remaining funds into something needed a bit more than replacing my perfectly good saw.

I bought an inflatable finishing room from Amazon and with some PVC pipe and a few connectors, it will stand up on its own. Finishing outside is tough with the constant wind and the finicky weather in Minnesota.

It fits nicely in the single stall of the garage. The overall footprint is 8.5' wide and and about 18 feet long with the blowers and supply tubes.



Interior is roughly 7'x12' with 6' ceiling height at the eaves and 7.5' in the middle so plenty of headroom. I used 1" PVC to build the frame so I can turn off the blowers when it isn't in use without having it collapse on anything drying in it.



It came with two blowers, one for inflation and the second pushes air in through the carbon filter on the lower left of the door in the picture above. The large windows on the sides are also carbon filters to allow air to exhaust and to catch overspray. The hose on the floor is the air supply from my Fuji HVLP turbine.

This last picture is with the blowers turned off and the finishing room collapsed.


So far the only drawback I can see is that I'm out of excuses if my finish doesn't come out perfect

[leehljp]

Properly Finishing a nice piece of furniture or beautiful wood product is what makes other people become intrigued with ones work and draws them into admiring it!

I haven't seen a finishing room like that before. Very functional looking. thanks for posting it.

[LCHIEN]

definitely cool.

[twistsol]

It's windy and rainy today and I just sprayed a bunch of bookshelf shelves, 6 sides and two face frames. A few of things I noticed right away.

• I need better lighting inside. While the garage is fairly bright, the ceiling windows don't let in enough of the light to work really well.
• Airflow in the booth is really good. Very little overspray fog in the air and what was there was gone pretty quickly.
• While this isn't the fault of the booth itself, It is too close to the garage door so moving in nearly 8' bookshelf sides is a bit difficult. I need to rethink placement because I can't open the garage door when the booth is inflated. I did open the entire end wall and was able to finagle the parts in and out too without much trouble.

The neighbor kids were very disappointed when they found out I didn't have a bounce house in the garage. I had a shot at being nearly as cool as the ice cream truck driver.

[twistsol]

I picked up some 4' LED lights at Menards and solved my lighting problem in the spray booth. I started with one, and added a second a couple of days later because I was still getting shadows.

[dbhost]

So in my 30s, actually not long before I joined this forum.... I helped a friend set up a spray booth to repaint his 78 Chevy long bed... He used poly tarps and PVC pipe / fittings similar to what you have there. Lighting was non existent for fear of sparking flamable vapors, and he somehow got a hand on an "explosion resistant" fan assembly intended for pro spray booths and rigged it up like one of those wooden box ambient air filters. I am pretty sure he still has every bit of it in the back of his garage. No clue how the poly tarp material is holding out though.... Makes me think that maybe a 10x10 square leg EZ Up with some sides on it would make a decent finishing room...

[twistsol]

The 10x10 EZ up would be a great idea as long as you can deal with the airflow for venting, and using clear plastic sheeting would allow for lighting from the outside.

I only spray water based finishes so there is no risk of explosion.