I was going to buy an inflatable temporary paint shop from eBay. I don’t buy from Amazon at all primarily because of their monopolistic attitude which I believe is not good for consumers or third party sellers. So I spent some time looking at various sizes and options and came to the conclusions I was looking at about $500 for an 8′ x 8′ x 13′ with 1 fan and a plenum for a second extraction ventilator plenum, plus $150 for another fan. I ultimately decided I could build my own temporary paint shop for a lot less and, what made it more appealing, is that once the Zenith 750 SD is built I am going to need a much larger temporary paint shop as I am going to paint he aircraft myself.
I took my time a little building my temporary paint shop inside my workshop. My primary material for the structure was the wood from the crate in which the Zenith 750 SD tail arrived. I have a couple of additional 2″ x 4″ x 8′ sticks lying around, and a roll of 6 mil. x 10′ x 100′ plastic. I put RAM board on the floor to protect the epoxy from getting painted as it is not slippery the way plastic would be. I used small pieces of gorilla tape to reinforce the plastic where I placed staples in the hope this would prevent the plastic sheet tearing.
All in, I think my materials purchases came to less than $200, maybe $250 if you include the 6 mil. plastic sheet I already had on hand (which is perfectly reasonable).
I bought a ventilator fan from Harbor Freight for $89 to draw the air from the workshop through the paint shop and exhaust the air outside. While the description says it’s a ventilator fan for paint shop / ventilation purposes and mentions auto spraying, the box says to not use it in a flammable vapour environment. I was not going to purchase the fan but one of the employees said he uses it with his inflatable paint shop he purchased from Amazon which he has setup in his garage and it works just fine.
While I say the structure is temporary, I expect I will be using it for at least 3 years so it is really a collapsible designed to fold up against the wall. As the structure is in front of the 12′ x 12′ rear sliding doors I also purchased another hoist / winch, which has not arrived yet, for $81 which I will mount up under the roof.
The “legs” are attached with bolts, as are the struts, at the top, that hold the legs vertical which allows me to remove 1 bolt and then, when the winch is used to pull the roof cross member in the middle of the floor up, the whole structure will swing reasonably flat against the rear wall, up out of the way. At least, that’s the plan 🙂
The area inside is 8′ high, 8′ deep and 12′ across which is plenty of space for spraying most, if not all, components.
When it is really cold, as it has been the past week or so, I use a blast / work propane heater at 60K BTU to bring the temperature in the shop up to about 64f from sub freezing, then use the mini-split heat pump to either maintain the temperature or bring it up a little warmer. The mini-split is, which is an 18K BTU, DIY, Mr. Cool product, is really good at cooling the place and keeping it warm, but it isn’t really efficient when the temperature outdoors is below about 35f even though it “works” down to 5f.
I will likely post a few more pictures here over time.