Painting a car is a pretty simple concept. You spray a liquid at the car and it sticks. Real simple right? Not really… there’s a lot of tricks to make the process go smoother and turn out nicely. The equipment you use is one of the major portions of the process for creating a nice, lasting paint job. So we often get questions on how many spray paint guns one should have to paint a car. We wanted to discuss the top reasons to have a dedicated primer gun in your shop. Read more below.
- Saves Time- Every time you use a paint gun you need to clean it thoroughly and it can become quite time consuming if you only have one gun on hand to spray with. We’ve found that it is handy to at least have a gun for primer and top coats as the needle/nozzle sizes are different and the cleaning down time can become troublesome if you only have one gun. A time saver is to quickly clean out your primer gun with Aerosol Injected Cleaner and then submerge the gun in our Paint Gun Cleaner while you’re working on the next step of your paint job. This will give you a paint or primer gun that is ready to use with little work.
- No Cross Contamination- Reusing the same paint gun for all steps of a project can potentially cause an issue if it isn’t cleaned 110%. You can end up with a speck or two of gray or black primer in your clear or color coats. We suggest using a dedicated primer gun that you can keep a 1.8-2.2 needle/nozzle in for higher build coatings like primer and sealer.
- Less Sanding- A paint Job is only as good as the base it is laid over. This means you need smooth primer and filler work to give you a smooth paint and clear coat. We suggest getting a quality primer gun like the Eastwood P500 Primer gun so you can lay smooth primer and save excessive block sanding of your primer. Ideally you want the primer to lay almost glass smooth like clear coat! Proper atomization of primer will help distribute it evenly over the panels and reduce the heavy texture that needs to be blocked off before paint.
Hopefully this article gave you some helpful tips on why you need a separate primer gun for your shop regardless of your skill level. You can find all of our paint and primer guns HERE.