Finishing without flaws

A perfect coat requires perfect prep, and that process begins with capturing fine dust at its source. Doing so will help avoid issues such as orange peel or fish-eye in the spray booth.

While wide belt and edge sanders are usually set up with adequate dust collection, portable sanders often rely on inadequate factory-supplied filter bags. The first step in finishing can be attaching a hose to these small tools. Several suppliers such as Rockler (rockler.com) and Woodcraft(woodcraft.com) supply hose adapters that hook up to dust collectors or shop vacuums, and tool manufacturers such as DeWalt (dewalt.com) and Festool (festoolusa.com) make adapters for their own brand tools. It’s possible to rig up an adapter for an off-brand sander too, using parts from the plumbing aisle at the hardware store.

Once the sander is tamed, a downdraft sanding table can eliminate most if not all the rest of the airborne fines that are created at the workbench. SandMan (sandmanproducts.com) offers these and also dedicated backdraft sanding booths for working on items that are a bit too bulky for a downdraft table, such as assembled cabinets.

The next step in building a finishing system is to give it a home. 

Installing a traditional spray booth can require a great deal of site prep that includes cutting holes in a roof, adding exhaust stacks, and arranging for vast volumes of costly make-up air. A line of booths from Ventless (ventless.com) circumvents those obstacles and lets a woodshop spray without drawing dust in from the rest of the shop or having to make up warm or cool air. The booths come in a variety of sizes, are suitable for both waterborne and lacquer coatings, and offer options such as custom lighting and dimensioning. Extraction rates run from 4,200 to 43,000 cfm, and Ventless can advise a shop owner on size.

Equipping the booth is next. Spray systems for wood range all the way from handheld guns to fully automated robotic lines, and the volume of work running through the booth determines what’s needed. 

There are several options here. 

A HVLP system uses a turbine to deliver a high volume of air at low pressure, and this carries the coating material to the work in a very controlled manner. The result is a gentle application that delivers an excellent finish while creating very little overspray. 

An airless gun basically does the opposite, using a high-pressurepump rather than an air compressor to force liquid through a tip that breaks down the finish into a very fine (called ‘atomized’) mist. This means more control but also more waste, and it’sfaster than HVLP. 

An air-assisted gun is a hybrid that combines airless and air technology to deliver good atomization, control and speed. 

And an LVLP gun uses low volume and low pressure, so it’s like a HVLP except with less material flowing. 

The ultimate overspray reducing technology is to use electrostatically charged paint, but that’s not so common in custom woodshops. It’s used more in large commercial production.

For larger woodshops, automated finishing systems (where there’s no operator holding a manual gun) can be static where fixed guns spray flat surfaces, or gantry-mounted where the guns move to cover larger areas. Then there are increasingly popular and more affordable robotic lines where flexible arms can move guns to cover surfaces that are more complex.

For smaller shops, complete coating delivery systems include the Semi-PRO 2 from Fuji (fujispraysystems.com), which includes a two-stage turbine, a bottom-feed, non-bleed spray gun, and a 25-foot Hi-Flex hose. This set-up is also available with a gravity gun, where the cup is on the top of the gun. The bottom-feed (siphon) gun’s cup is under the barrel, and that’s a better set-up for larger volumes of thinned material. The gravity feed is easier to control and has less overspray, plus it’s also easier to clean.

Changing coating types or colors can be a challenge in smaller shops, and the Quick Cup Connector system from SATA(sata.com) is a clever solution here. It works with the company’s Rapid Preparation System (RPS). It offers reusable aluminum or plastic gravity or suspended cups, plus advanced options such as an agitator cup for processing quick-settling materials, or a BVD pressurized cup for processing highly viscous materials. The original RPS cup has only three parts (cup, lid, strainer) and it’sdesigned to simplify mixing, painting, refilling, and storing.

Finishing Brands, which is part of Innovative Finishing Solutions (innovativefinishing.ca), includes such familiar names as DeVilbiss, Ransburg, BGK and Binks. 

DeVilbiss supplies guns to spray a wide variety of solvent-based and waterborne coatings, including single and dual component set-ups plus low and high solids materials. The company notes that “gravity feed guns are ideal for low-volume, detailed work; suction feed works well for medium projects; and pressure feed is best for large-scale industrial applications where high output and consistency are required”.

Ransburg designs and manufactures electrostatic finishing equipment. BGK makes electric infrared and gas catalytic curing ovens for liquid, powder, wax, UV and adhesives. And Binks excels in control equipment, such as the new Intelliflow RCS3 for large-scale finishing operations. This is a componentproportioner (mixer) that delivers precise, electronically controlled, gear pump driven mixing and metering. 

Grizzly Industrial (grizzly.com) is currently offering clearance pricing on several of its spray guns, paint tanks and tips. Among them is the T23092, which is a high-pressure gun that works with medium-to-high viscosity materials. The cup holds one liter of material, and the nozzle spray pattern width is 7" to 9". The gun hooks up with a 1/4" NPT connection and consumes an average of 6 to 8.8 cfm of air. The operating pressure is 44 to 58 psi. 

Innovative Finishing Solutions also supplies Fanuc paint robots.

For detail finishing and fine work on furniture, an airbrush is hard to beat. These smaller spray guns offer pinpoint accuracy and very little waste and overspray. Grex USA (grexusa.com) carries five different airbrush combination kits. They include either a top or side fed airbrush gun along with a mini compressor, a hose and the relevant accessories. The compressor (Grex AC1810) is an oil-less, portable unit that runs up to 60 PSI and uses household current.

An all-round source for woodshops working on a finishing system is Total Finishing Supplies (totalfinishingsupplies.com). Woodworkers will find a large catalog of spray guns, booth filters, compressed air equipment, and spray booth lighting. The latter includes the Walcom 360 True Light and the True Light 2.0. These mount to all major brand spray guns, even powder guns, and illuminate the surface being sprayed with daylight-colored LEDs.  

Space management is a real challenge for woodworkers setting up a finishing system, and two companies directly address this with clever solutions.

The PivotPoint from Guffey Systems (guffeysystems.com) is a very flexible system that lets a woodworker load a door or drawer on a hands-free hanger and rotate the part 360 degrees or lock it at every 90 degrees. It can be set up in the shop or at a job site and can grow to fit a shop’s needs.

PivotPoint’s big brother, PivotLine, is a manual-rail finishing system that rivals the speed and throughput of an automated line at a fraction of the cost, space, and implementation time. It’smade up of stationary rails, mobile rails, rolling spray hubs, and an assortment of hangers. Very customizable and configurable, it can fit any shop size or budget and can easily be expanded as needed. It allows the woodworker to spray vertically at eye level, rather than hunched over flat components.

PaintLine (paintline.com) supports cabinet and furniture shops with a line of spray stands, drying racks, portable booths and other finishing system components. Its SprayTwirly lets a woodworker spray cabinet doors quickly and easily and then transfer them to the space-saving ProDryingRack to cure. Shops that prefer spraying cabinet doors vertically can use the ProDryingRack SD (PSDR) series, which lets the operator spray all sides of a part while it’s mounted on a spinner assembly, and then hang up to 50 cabinet doors on its 18-foot drying space. The cabinetmaker doesn’t need to walk around each part to getthe edges, and there are no more wet cabinet doors spread all over the shop as they dry.

And drying can be a challenge because those parts take up a lot of space, and the woodworker needs to control dust, temperature, humidity and other factors while the carriers evaporate. That means other work such as sawing and shaping is often postponed. Green-Fast-Cure (greenfastcure.com) offers an alternative to that scenario. The company has created a technology that mixes fresh air and gas for a more effective infrared cure, capturing time and energy savings. Plus, it’s a plug-and-play system so it can be installed in any shop very quickly, and in many cases the first batch of doors can be curingwithin a day. Using flameless catalytic combustion, the GF2 system directs infrared medium waves over parts.

For medium and larger sized shops, SCM Group(scmgroup.com) offers a huge range of  range of products including complete automatic or robotized spraying lines, flat dryers, vertical dryers, UV and UV-LED curing systems, complete roller coating and curtain coating lines, printing machines and robots and 3D lines for doors, window frames and three-dimensional panels.

When it comes to new finishing technologies, catalyst printers from Florida manufacturer DPI Lab (dpi-lab.com) may be worth a look. The company offers the ability to print inlays, photos, logos, or even a 3D textured surface directly on wood or composites. The process involves no overlay and no dry time, because it uses instant UV-cured inks that resist scratching and fading. And it’s eco-friendly too, emitting negligible levels of VOCs. 

Thankfully, shop owners who are building a finishing system now have the world at their fingertips. A little time spent on search engines can answer many questions, and offer several opinions so that those answers can be more balanced than they were in the past. Some sites worth visiting include Apollo Sprayers International, Anest Iwata USA, California Air Tools, E-Z Mix, Earlex, Graco, Jet-Kleen, Martech Services Co., NMR Spray Equipment, Prevost Corp., Sames, Trimaco.com, and Wandres Corp.

Originally published in the March 2026 issue of Woodshop News.