My paint gun decided to become a glitter cannon yesterday

Honestly, I was doing a simple respray on a Honda Civic fender in the booth. Tbh, I had just mixed a fresh batch of metallic silver and loaded up my Devilbiss StartingLine. Ngl, I pulled the trigger and instead of a nice fan, it shot a huge clump of wet paint and then a cloud of dry metallic flake everywhere. I looked like a disco ball for a solid ten minutes. Has anyone else had a gun just totally fail to atomize like that, or did I just get super unlucky?

3 comments

3 Comments

miaprice7d agoTop Commenter

My buddy at the Westside body shop said he saw this once when the fluid nozzle was cracked. The paint basically bypasses the air cap, so it just spits instead of sprays. Could be a tiny piece of debris jammed in there too, right?

kevinallen7d ago

Actually, I have to push back on the cracked nozzle idea. A crack bad enough to let paint bypass would be huge and you'd see fluid leaking everywhere before you even pulled the trigger. More often, this is just a classic case of the air pressure being way too low for the material. If your compressor is struggling or the regulator's set wrong, even a perfect gun will spit and sputter glitter everywhere. That tiny piece of debris you mentioned is a much more likely culprit than a whole cracked tip.

lisas787d ago

Heard about a guy at my old shop who had a similar glitter bomb moment. He was spraying a bumper and his gun just started dumping dry pearl straight into the air cap. Turns out he forgot to tighten the fluid tip after cleaning it last week. Paint was basically sneaking around the sides and getting shredded. Whole booth looked like a unicorn sneezed in it.