A street performer spray painted silver.

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Spray Guns

Spray painting is a painting technique where a device sprays a coating (paint, ink, varnish etc.) through the air onto a surface. The most common types employ compressed gas — usually air compressed by an air compressor — to atomize and direct the paint particles. more...

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Spray guns developed from airbrushes and the two are usually distinguished by their size and the size of the spray pattern they produce — with airbrushes being hand held and used instead of a brush for very fine work such as photo retouching, painting nails or fine art.

Types

Canned spray paint

The most common type in the consumer market are cans of aerosol paint. A metal aerosol can contains the highly pressurized paint which becomes atomized into a fine spray when the paint is released through a valve operated by depressing it with the finger. These aerosol cans are cheap, small, easily transported and easily operated. This technology enabled and became synonymous with graffiti, but it is also widely used by private persons for small paint work.

Conventional

See also: Airbrush

A spray gun combines the coating (paint) and compressed air from a separate air compressor in order to atomize the coating and direct it to the target surface. The coating is held either in a small bottle or container attached to the spray gun or in a separate pressurised container attached to the spray gun with a hose. General rule of thumb is that this type of gun puts 1/3 of the coating on the substrate being coated and 2/3 into the air.

HVLP (High Volume Low Pressure)

This is similar to a conventional spray gun using a compressor to supply the air, but the spray gun itself requires a lower pressure (LP). A higher volume (HV) of paint is therefore applied at a lower air pressure. This results in more paint landing on the target surface instead of staying airborne. A regulator is often required so that the air pressure from a conventional compressor can be lowered for the HVLP spray gun.

As a rule of thumb this method puts 2/3 of the coating on the substrate and 1/3 in the air. True HVLP guns use 8 – 20 cfm and a minimum 5 hp industrial compressor is required. HVLP spray systems are used in the automotive, marine, architectural coating, furniture finishing, and cosmetic industries.

LVLP (Low Volume Low Pressure)

Like HVLP, these spray guns also operate at a lower pressure (LP), but they apply a low volume (LV) of coating (paint). This is a further effort at increasing the transfer efficiency (amount of coating that ends up on the target surface) of spray guns.