Paint-Booths.com Blog

Smiling New Paint Booth Specialist: Welcome Julie!

Standard Tools and Equipment is proud to welcome Julie Surprenant to our sales & customer care team as a paint booth specialist!

Originally from Rhode Island, Julie moved to North Carolina 10 years ago. Julie brings with her 18 years of marketing experience and a yellow belt in Six Sigma training. She is working toward getting a BA in PR/Marketing from Ashford University.

In her spare time, Julie is a mom to a Cole, who is starting Kindergarten this year. She is Red Sox fan as well as the local Greensboro team, the Grasshoppers! She spends a lot of her time in the community. She’s the Director of T-ball and Blastball in Stokesdale, NC and a volunteer with HorsePower in Colfax, helping kids and adults with disabilities ride horses.

We’re excited to have Julie here at Standard Tools and Equipment! We look forward to journey.

How to determine if a make-up air system is required: It’s simple math

Anytime a paint booth is installed in a building, the amount of exhausted air must be a consideration.

For example, a booth exhausting 13,000 cubic feet per minute installed in a building measuring 50 x50 x 15 (37,500 cubic feet), the air will change every two minutes. This produces a negative pressure condition on the building that can cause safety issues. If the building is equipped with gas-fired unit heaters, the negative pressure condition can actually pull gas from the pilot valves and put raw gas into the room. NFPA-33 addresses this with a calculation.

NFPA-33 A.7.3 “If the volume of the room or building where the exhaust system is located is not at least equal to 20 times the volumetric capacity of the fans (three air changes per hour), then additional make-up air should be provided.”

Going back to the 13,000 cfm exhaust fan. 13,000 x 20 = 260,000 cubic feet. The room would have to be 110’ x 110’x 20’ (264,500 cubic feet).

The rule of thumb is to provide the same amount of air being exhausted with some adjustment in the unit to provide the customer with the proper pressure he requires. Some may want slightly more positive pressure while some may want a neutral pressure building.

Make-up air units can be placed outside or inside as long as the intake air is drawn from the outside. The control panels are mounted inside the building and can be interlocked to the paint booth to operate simultaneously. If you want more information on the Sure-Cure units from Standard Tools and Equipment, visit us online.

The ductwork is simple, the discharge duct should be equipped with a diffuser to help distribute air more evenly into the room.

If you have any questions, give us a call and we’ll gladly assist in determining if more makeup air is needed. 800-312-7488.

KNOW WHO YOU’RE DOING BUSINESS WITH

One of the benefits that the Internet has brought with it is the ability to find almost anything that you’re looking for from the comfort of your computer. No longer is location a barrier to doing business. Let me give you an example. Do you remember that big purple dinosaur from the 90’s, Barney? Say you’re throwing a Barney birthday party for your soon-to-be-three year old, no longer do you have to drive to a zillion stores to see who carries supplies from that popular children show from 25 years ago. Now, you can hop on Amazon or Ebay, check out partycity.com or scoot over to Walmart’s site to order custom banners, posters, balloons and table clothes that have the big purple Dino on it. Within an hour, you can be done. Some of these products come from China (the Dinosaur is popular over there), some come from personal collections, and some are sold exclusively online for those searching for the hard-to-find supplies. Some of the sites you may choose to order from because you know of their business (everyone knows Walmart) and are familiar with them. But what if you have never heard of them or have no idea who they are? Would you still choose to do business with them? It’s hard to determine how genuine a business is when you are simply looking at their web site. When you are looking for a paint booth, you are looking at a large investment… not just some balloons or party décor. How can you decide if the company you’re looking at online is a legitimate business that will provide you a quality booth?

Here are some signs that you may want to pay attention to when shopping online.

Remember that anyone can get a web site and pay to show up on Google. Here are some results for “Paint booth” on Google.

A nice web site may be a good sign, but what is contained within that web site is even more important. Don’t be swayed with how “nice” a site is… but for the information they provide about themselves. When you search for a product on Google, remember that anyone can pay to show up in the ads … the one’s who show up in the organic results are the ones that are there because of the content they provide as well as the record they have proven to Google.

THERE IS NO PHYSICAL ADDRESS LISTED

This is a big giveaway that it is a company you may not want to do business with. When ordering anything online, it’s important to find out that it is a legitimate business before you give them payment information. If the company does not freely provide their location (actual address), business history and how their booths are made (and where they are made)…. I would go with a more established organization. Get a physical address and Google Image the map of it. A PO Box is not a physical address. FYI- When you Google our address, this is what you see, our office and plant facilities…. with an actual brick-and-mortar location and cars in the parking lot.

A companies web site should include: where their booths are manufactured, where their booths are shipped from, who is makes the booths, how long the business has been making booths, how many employees they have, etc.

Some competitors list several states that they have “locations” in… but in reality they are a distributor of a company that have storage warehouses in those locations. Some of these companies do not have any kind of brick-and-mortar location, although they present themselves to.

If you are shopping on a site like eBay or Amazon, make certain you know the company you are purchasing it from.

NO PRESENCE ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Can you find their basic web site but nothing else? No Facebook page or YouTube account. No blogs to read. Remember that anyone can set up a basic web site, that doesn’t mean they are a legitimate business. Find a company that constantly posts blogs with useful information, post photos of client’s products and testimonials. Companies should be utilizing as many avenues as possible to tell you about their company and products. If not, perhaps you should ask, “why?”

FEEDBACK + REVIEWS

Every company has their share of upset customers, but if all you find online are customers that are complaining about their experience with a company…. It should be a red flag. You should be able to see both positive and some negative comments when you look at their reviews or scan their social pages.

PHOTOS OF ACTUAL PRODUCTS

We all want to see what the finished product looks like. Look for customer photos on their site or on their Facebook page. Drawings are the industry norm, but their social pages and blogs should provide images of what their booths look like after installation.

TYPOS AND ERRORS ON SITE

Are there misspelled words or errors in the formatting? For example, instead of “14’W x 10’H x 24’D” does it read “14’0?wid? x 10’0?hi?gh x 24’0?deep”?

These are signs that the business is:

a)     Copying and pasting the information from somewhere else.
b)    Doesn’t take the time to really proof their site for accuracy. Make sure you do business with a company that pays attention to the details.
c)     English isn’t their first language, so perhaps they are located elsewhere.

WHO THEY ARE

You should know whom you’re doing business with. Can you easily find a name, or photo, of someone at the company, or the CEO? Are there photos of the employees posted on their Facebook? Are there email addresses or direct phone numbers? Is there an “About Us” portion of their site that tells you their mission and why they are passionate about what they do? All of these little details add up to give you the information you need to make an informed decision on whom you are doing business with.

We thank you for your trust and your business!

We Don’t Need No stinking Exhaust Filters

Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a movie released in 1948 with Humphrey Bogart. This movie is not rated as one of the best or most viewed, but it gave us a one liner that is often repeated. In the movie Bogart and his group, along with several other groups of ne’er-do-wells, are looking for a lost treasure of gold. One group tries to fool Bogart and his gang by acting as Mexican Federales (or mounted police). “If you are Federales”, asks Bogart, “where are your badges?” The bandit leader replies, “Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges!” Great line, but what does it have to do with spray booths? I feel like that is what customers say about exhaust filters for their booth. “Filters? We don’t need no exhaust filters.”

One of the main purposes of a spray booth is to capture overspray. You do not want it to exhaust on top of your building. Your co-workers do not want it deposited onto their vehicles in the parking lot. You neighbors do not want it on their property. The government does not look favorably on the overspray getting to the atmosphere, plants, soil or water. Continue reading We Don’t Need No stinking Exhaust Filters

MANIFOLDING SPRAY BOOTH DUCTWORK AND IMPROPER AIRFLOW

In this photo, an installer has chosen to manifold three spray booth exhaust duct runs. (A manifold is a pipe or chamber branching into several openings.)

This layout probably looked great on paper and reduced the number of roof penetrations from three to just one.

Reality is such as nasty teacher. The static pressure (resistance to the flow of air) was greater in the top portion of the ductwork than in the spray booths. The ductwork downstream from the manifold point (above the joints) should be much larger than what is in the photo. The air ventilated out of one booth actually flows into its neighbor.

Our booths are designed to meet specific airflow needs and we design them with ductwork. The spray booths in the photo were designed to have individual exhaust ductwork runs; they were not installed according to the design or instructions provided by Standard Tools.

Manifolding of exhaust ductwork is allowed by NFPA-33 only if devices exist in the ductwork that detect improper airflow. The static pressure within the spray booth will change as the overspray builds up in the exhaust filters and as the obstruction within the booth changes (based on size and shape of parts in the spray booth). This can be very technical and overly-complex. The simple rule, and what Standard Tools recommends, is no manifolding of exhaust ductwork. Keeping ductwork simple is the least expensive and best performing strategy in the long run. We suggest that you install your booth, and your ductwork, according to our recommendations to ensure proper airflow within your booth.

A Bigger State-Of-The-Art Air Makeup Unit

Leading North Carolina paint booth manufacturer announces the big brother to their Sure-Cure^® Air Makeup Unit Line

February 20, 2015 – GREENSBORO, N.C.—Standard Tools and Equipment Co. has been designing and manufacturing paint spray booths since 1997 and has built over 18,000 paint spray booths. In October of 2013, the company announced the release of their own air makeup unit (AMU), the Sure-Cure^® AMU Ignite, available in 10K – 14K CFM with ETL certification.

Standard Tools and Equipment began 2015 with the release of the Ignite’s big brother, the Sure-Cure^® AMU Inferno. Available in 17K – 26K CFM, it is also ETL certified and available for larger paint booths and truck booths.

Both units are designed, manufactured and sold by Standard Tools and Equipment from the Greensboro, North Carolina plant.

“The launch of the Sure-Cure AMU Ignite in 2013 was successful, we were selling units before we even announced the development. We got such positive feedback from our customers on our unit and our shipping times, that we got right to work designing the larger unit,” said Standard Tools and Equipment Co. CEO Michael Kestler. “We continue to offer products to our customers that meet our high standards of excellence at an affordable price. Our AMU line provides them a safe and reliable unit with all the bells and whistles included in the marketed price. With the addition of the Inferno unit, we can provide a unit for any size booth they may have.”

One of the gaps in the market that the company noticed was the extremely long production times in ordering an AMU. We could design, customize, build and ship a paint booth in less than 10 days but our customers were waiting months for their air makeup units, which were sourced out at the time.

After some research, Standard Tools and Equipment decided that they wanted to start developing their own units. They were determined to make their air makeup units safer and quicker … to meet the needs of their customer.

“We have built an extraordinary unit that can be built to the customer’s specifications, and shipped within just 2-3 weeks,” John Mauney, Director of Manufacturing at Standard Tools and Equipment Co. “We’re offering our customers the opportunity to be up and running quicker. We understand that they have a business to run and we want to help them do that.”

For Standard Tools and Equipment, that’s exactly how they began to make paint booths back in 1997. “We noticed a major need and as a player in the industry for many years, we already had all the right components to meet that need,” Kestler said. “We have used our experience to develop over 18,000 booths that are unsurpassed in performance and value for our customers.”

As one of the largest Paint Booth manufacturers in the United States, Standard Tools and Equipment Company pulled together everything they had learned over the last 15+ years to develop air makeup units. Safety was important as the company started to plan out how their unit would be different than others on the market. Many safety features complete this AMU, including flame failure reset, multi-service disconnect and a low-flame auto setting at the loss of power. Their units are designed to be the safest available on the market today.

For more information on the Sure-Cure AMU products, visit https://www.paint-booths.com/category/paint-booth-air-make-up-units.html

Baby Its Cold Outside!! — Air Makeup Units

A favorite song of the winter holidays is ‘Baby, Its Cold Outside’. The crooners of the 1960s like Dean Martin, Andy Williams and Ann-Margret make this a fun song to hear. The fellow in this song reminds his girl of all of the problems of a cold winter night as she keeps trying to talk herself into leaving.

As we are bracing for this “Arctic Blast” about to hit us on the East Coast, we’re thinking of all those painters that have to open the building doors when the spray booth is used … and Baby, Its Cold Inside Too!!

At Standard Tools, we make heated air makeup units that can be added to your current system. Spray booths with intake plenums (or intake canopies) can be directly ducted to our Sure-Cure AMU system. Cross-flow or open-face booths can be supplied with Sure-Cure AMU systems designed to put heated air right into the building.

The Sure-Cure direct-gas-fired units can be heated with liquid propane or natural gas.
The units are ETL-listed to USA and Canadian safety standards and are designed to provide tempered air (for spraying) and up to 160-F for curing.
When ordering your unit, there are many options about power, layout and orientation.
Systems are available from 10,000 cfm to 26,000 cfm.
We offer ducting components and wiring harnesses.

The best part is that your unit can be built to your specifications and ready to ship to your facility in just a few weeks.

Stop opening the building doors to bring in the freezing air. OSHA requires a permanent spray area to be at least 65-F. Most coatings do not work well at colder temperatures, which can lead to poor quality and poor productivity.

Visit our website or call our Sales team for more information.

Quality Furniture Made in Furniture Spray Booth

Tanya with Paint Booth Specialist Kelly Goudy

Being based in North Carolina, we are right up the road from some pretty impressive furniture makers. “Furniture Market” is a HUGE thing around these parts and a lot of furniture makers use spray booths to apply the finish to their products.

Back in November, I had the great privilege to meet Tanya Miller at the Carolina Christmas Classic in our hometown, Greensboro, NC. She along with her husband Josh, own and operate Oak Craft Inc. out of Brockway, PA. They specialize in handcrafted red oak and cherry furniture that is made in many popular styles. I took a few pictures of the quality craftsmanship after visiting with Tanya at the show.

I first met Tanya over the phone in the spring of this year when she called inquiring about needing one of our paint spray booths for their shop, a furniture spray booth. During our conversation in April she shared that she would actually be in Greensboro for the Christmas Classic in November. I love getting to meet some of our customers face to face whenever I can and this was a great opportunity.

After admiring their beautiful kitchen tables and servers that they had on display (see pictures of those below), we talked a bit about the furniture spray booth she purchased and how it was working great for them. She was kind enough to share her pleasure in doing business with us and especially how easy it actually was to get the booth chosen, delivered and installed just like we promised. A satisfied customer encourages us in our mission.

We exist to deliver excellence to the automotive and painting industry…every customer – every product – every day.

DSC_0553[1] — Using a Standard Tools Open Face Booth (OFB) for furniture

If you are in need of a quality and affordable paint booth to make your business better, give me a call. If you are looking for some really high quality, hand crafted furniture for your home, call Tanya and Josh. Whichever phone call you make, you won’t be disappointed.

1-888-312-7488

Why you won’t find a variable frequency drive (VFD) on our unheated booths

We have many customers that ask us if we offer a variable frequency drive or VFD for our paint booths. The answer is simply “No” and we have a very good reason on why.

A variable frequency drive allows you to control the speed of a motor. It is also known to be called a variable speed drive, adjustable speed drive or an adjustable frequency drive. We are very familiar with the VFD because we utilize them on our Air Makeup Units (which controls the exhaust fan on our heated booths – but not the intake fan). The difference is when we control the exhaust fan on the AMU’s, your booth remains in compliance and safe to use.

The VFD can turn the speed of the motor up or down depending on the motors capabilities. Most customer’s request this so they can reduce the speed of the motor for several applications explained, but not fully known to us as a manufacturer.

The simple answer, “No”, is followed by an explanation that if you turn down the motors speed; the booth will not be in compliance with the code requirements. A certain amount of airflow is required to meet the NFPA-33 guidelines.

To explain it a little more clearly, here is what our engineer Tracy Beach has said about this subject:

Insufficient airflow:

* will lead to poor painting quality

* will cause excessive fumes

* may easily lead to a fire or explosion due to flammable fumes not being exhausted from the spray booth. This is not a matter of convenience; the spray booth must be properly exhausted or it is simply a box holding lights and explosive fumes. The ventilation performance of most spray booths designed by Standard Tools is 6-10% above the NFPA-33 and OSHA code requirements. Decreasing the airflow would be dangerous and may result in poor coating quality since the over spray would not move away from coated surfaces.

We urge our customer’s to contact the local authorities and find out what their cities requirements are prior to making a purchase of our paint booth. Whether it is the building department or fire marshal, we want them to be aware of the requirements. We also offer a paint booth permitting guide to help them along in the process.

Please contact us with any questions or concerns you may have. We are here to help guide you in the decision making process.

Paint Booth Installer: A Testimonial

Everyone who has been around Standard Tools long enough has heard us say over and over, our booths are so easy to install…. they are designed to be installed by the end user! This saves our customers thousands of dollars. It just takes 2-3 guys a couple days. That’s right, most of our customer’s install their own booths.

However, if you would like to have a booth professionally installed…. we have a network of installers all over the United States and Canada that we can refer you to.

Here’s one of our Installers, Willie, who has installed thousands of booths — all different make and models — and why he would buy a booth from Standard Tools.

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