It’s been a joke with me that my gear is “Totally Pro". My dollar store brushes? Totally Pro. My craft store acrylics? Totally Pro. My makeshift SDCS box filled with cardboard scraps I use to hold my parts? Totally Pro.
All of it is just me doing what I can with what I got.
One area where this doesn’t really work well is my spray booth. It's a cardboard box that I used in the summer months to spray parts outside. It was - at best - a glorified windscreen. It is currently holding a bunch of random stuff as it’s too cold to do anything outside what with it being the middle of Winter where I'm at.
This left me with one option…
I needed to make a new Totally Pro Spray Booth.
The idea was simple: I needed an actual spray booth that I could use indoors with my acrylics. It had to have all the parts of a proper desktop booth without being big or expensive. I have been searching for something to fill this spot in my equipment for Years. My Art Desk has little to no room so most commercial booths are out of the question.
Even if it did, I needed something that could be packed up and put away no problem as I have little space to store things. Again, this knocks out most commercial booths out there.
Then there's the price. Small-ish desktop booths cost over $100 for the cheapest entries. You are getting $100+ worth of equipment for some of these but it's still too pricey for a bit of kit I'll use once in a great while.
On the Maker side of things, I’ve seen Plenty of DIY booths made from storage bins and bathroom vent fans and LED strips for lighting. Same with ones built from plastic foamboard. They're too big for my needs or needlessly expensive at some point in the process - usually the fan as it needs to be able to handle possibly flammable vapor.
Again, my biggest worry is Space – both packed and in-use. Those fans eat up the bulk of it. That particular way of building a booth was scrapped, too.
I needed a better solution.
Enter the Solder Fume Fan.
Although rare that I do electronics, I do love watching folks make stuff. I was going through some repair videos while writing one night and I noticed that the person was using a little boxy desktop fan – a 140mm computer fan in a little blue box with a filter - to pull the smoke away from them as they worked. It was a commercial product, too. Unlike a homemade piece, I could actually buy that.
This gave me an idea.
Find a cheap and super basic solder fume fan with a speed control. I toss that into a box big enough to hold a replacement booth filter. It's small enough to fit on the desk and I could use the fan elsewhere if I needed to.
And thus the Totally Pro Spray Booth Mk.2 was born! = D
I had a small 12 inch by 8 inch by 4 inch box from the last batch of parts I’d bought from Gundam Planet. It's shorter than most spray booth filters but a pair of scissors made the filter fit.
The fan unit I bought has a little wire base so I planned that into the design. It keeps the box from sliding around. The unit has bump out on the front and back with one holding the thin charcoal filter. That’s the side that pulls air and the side I had to cut a hole in the box to fit. A little slice and dice later and I can stick the whole box onto the fan with a good mechanical fit. It acts as another air seal, too. The filter just goes right into the box and the thing is ready to rock.
The easiest part was holding the flaps open so I could use the thing. I just unbent some paperclips and slid them in-between the layers of the cardboard to make everything both stay open and easily removable when it’s time to pack it away.
Now… you might wonder if this was a good idea. Well, the suction from the fan is more than enough at 2/3rds speed to draw the paint spray from my little airbrush. The filters catch any particulate that’s at risk of making my Art Desk a pain to clean (I placed a bit of paper behind it to check if it was doing the job I needed it to). The fan is theoretically Electrostatic Discharge (ESD) Safe so that should make it less of a fire risk.
The whole thing cost me like $50. Only extra thing I didn’t need to do was bring a different box to this project. You could literally buy the stuff and just use the box it shipped in.
Overall, I’m happy with this. It works like I need it to. I can now use my airbrush on stuff and in the comfort of my own home, no less!
I'm starting a youtube channel with a friend and I'd like to commission banner art, an icon, and hopefully a theme as well, not necessarily all from the same artist. It will be a video-game channel and we are open to discussion for prices.
If you or anyone you know is an artist who is taking commissions I would love to hear from you!
