Common causes of contamination in spray booths

When it comes to automotive refinishing, contamination is a common issue that can significantly impact the quality of your work. However, contamination is easy to resolve if you know what to look out for. From dust and debris to poor spray booth preparation, we can help you achieve a quality finish on your next spray booth job.

Get to grips with these 8 common causes of contamination and learn how to avoid them.

1. Improper vehicle cleaning

This should be your first port of call before entering the spray booth. Cleaning vehicles before they enter the paint booth will help to keep common contaminants such as dirt far away from the work area.

2. Negative air pressure

Achieving the correct air pressure balance within your spray booth is vital, however by law we must have a negative air pressure to stop harmful vapours exiting the cabin through tiny openings around the booth. 

Negative pressure is more likely to contaminate your spray booth as the air flow will pull in as much external air as possible, including dirt and debris from outside of the booth – just like a vacuum cleaner would. Therefore adjusting the booth so that it is just negative but not too far is important, something that auto balance can achieve.

3. Incorrect vehicle loading

When loading vehicles into the spray booth, the booth should always be switched off to avoid the negative pressure sucking in airborne contamination from the workshop.

4. Poor surface preparation

When prepping a vehicle for painting, it’s important vehicle parts are thoroughly cleaned before sanding. If you forget to properly clean the surfaces before sanding, any contamination left behind is easily transferred to other parts of the vehicle, thus contaminating your paintwork.

5. Improper maintenance of spray guns

After every colour or product change, we would recommend you clean your spray booth guns in a specialist paint mixing or gun cleaning room. It’s also important to thoroughly clean your spray booth guns with a high-quality gun cleaner. This will ensure any remaining paint is removed before the next job.

6. Technicians are wearing the wrong clothing

Proper spray booth overalls and gloves should always be worn when painting, but these should always be taken off when doing sanding or other potentially dirty operations away from the paint booth..

7. Spray booth velocity is incorrect

A fully balanced, fully extracted floor will always give a better extraction performance over a centralised pit or cross draft booth. Where you do not have a fully extracted floor, careful positioning of the vehicle can improve extraction performance.

8. Dust extraction system isn’t working properly

Our dust extraction systems are built with powerful suction and turbine technology to extract dust and debris at the source of creation to stop it entering the spraybooth environment. If your dust extraction system appears to be letting you down, it might be time for a quick maintenance check. For assistance with your spray booth, whatever make or model, get in touch.

Spray booth equipment you can trust

As automotive paint booth experts, our team is on-hand to help with any spray booth contamination concerns you might have when it comes to car refinishing. We can also help with enhancing your spray booth’s productivity and performance as well as increasing energy savings. Take a look at our case studies to see how we’ve helped other automotive companies become more efficient.

To discuss your spray booth options, call us on 01706 363555 or email sales@junair.co.uk. You can also find our enquiry form here.

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