It took us a few days to get the spray booth setup, but its finally done.  We spent the majority of the day yesterday plumbing the new compressor to the new filter we picked up on Friday.  All the hard work has paid off with a leak free system.

Sam soldering the copper pipe.

Multiple shut off valves, as we’ll be plumbing more air lines to the rest of the shop when we have time.

We needed 25 feet of copper piping between the compressor and the filter so we had to improvise a little trap run.  The pipes are sloped so that condensation in the pipes flows towards the shut off valve at the bottom.

Good to go.  The air line from the filter will run directly into the spray booth.

After a month delay, we finally got it in and are ready to plumb it to our new air compressor (an 80 gallon beast).

We’ll get this all hooked up over the next day or two and clearcoat non-stop until everyone has their parts.

The first two smaller filters remove any oil and dirt from the air, while the large tank removes any moisture.  Having clean, dry air is essential to a quality finish on painted parts.  If the air isn’t clean, any contaminates get blown out right along with the clearcoat and end up on the part.

The new compressor is huge.  Our first compressor from 2 years ago was only 5 gallons.  Last year we bought a 25 gallon compressor that we out grew in a few months.  Hopefully we won’t have to replace this new one for years to come.

We signed a new lease last week and now are in a building that is twice as big as our old facility.  Now we have the room we desperately needed to continue making cool parts (and hopefully we’ll be able to speed things up a bit too).   The new space is only a block away and we were able to get 90% of our equipment moved over the weekend, so there shouldn’t be any disruption to current or future orders.

With the new space we’ll finally have the space and 220v wiring to get some real, heavy duty tools that will make production a lot easier and safer.

A few pictures from before we moved in (I’ll make another post detailing all the new stuff we’ve got once we’re fully operational):

I hope to have the other custom B8 sets finished by the end of the week.

You can compare these new 20oz shots to some older 11oz 2×2 twill B8 sets we made a few months ago.