Noxious Cloud! RUN!
March 12, 2009
For ‘Priming the Firebird’ I slapped together some cardboard boxes to make a small ‘booth’ without the ventilation. For those of you shaking their heads at the lack of ventilation, yes you should be shaking your head. I’d shake my head too but I’m already dizzy enough from this little experiment.
The single most important thing I learned from ‘Priming the Firebird’ is that I’m going to need to ventilate my workspace. The three seconds I used Duplicolor resulted in a cloud, yes really a cloud, of noxious gas. The cloud dissipated relatively quickly but the vapours didn’t. I had to open the windows in the basement and some on the main floor to air the house out.
This is a serious issue. I’m going to have to look into creating some kind spray booth or alter my bench to include an exhaust fan.
A quick search of FichtenFoo.com (excellent site by the way) resulted in a nice write up about his spray booth. http://fichtenfoo.net/blog/building-my-spraybooth/
He’s just using some cheapo bathroom exhaust fans and running it out of what looks like standard 2″ PVC similar to what you might have on your furnace for intake and exhaust already.
My bench is in the furnace room so I can just run the pipe out in the same general area as the ones for the furnace. I won’t have any real problems getting the pipe out as I can run the pipe of the top plate, between the joists, and out the plywood to the outside. Looks like he needed to drill his foundation! Don’t think I’d want to do that.
I’m going to think about the rest of the modifications. I’m not too sure I want bathroom fans. Setting aside the look, they take up a lot of space. Also, the fact that he has two fans doesn’t bode well for this solution. I’m guessing that one fan doesn’t have enough CFM to vent the gases from only the top. Could be that the CFM isn’t high enough for a wide open booth though. Maybe focusing the draw closer and in a more enclosed space would make the fan more efficient. Like I said I’m going to have to puzzle this out.
On a side note I think my noxious cloud is called ‘overspray’, judging by his comments on installing the second fan.
Looks like I’m going to making a trip to Home Depot. It’s going to be fun explaining what I’m trying to do..
