Homemade Powder Coating Gun

Well hello youtube, today what I wanted to be able to show you is how I built my own

powder

coating

gun. You might not necessarily think there's much to see, but I think it works brilliantly because I was really surprised by the particular results it got. Now that I have it, I think I probably built this for, say, about 20 bucks. Let's just say it's always very difficult to be able to quantify some of these particular costs because there are things you already have and things you get cheap, etc., so I'll do that. Explain each step here.

This particular high voltage module box I built cost me about nine dollars, but that's just because of the two particular components inside the particular

powder

coating

gun. Here this is just a plastic bottle and some PVC. I already had one. These particular pistol grips, but you can get them for ten bucks. I haven't included them in that particular cost and this particular plug package that powers this particular unit that I have here, I got it from an old Internet modem, so let's say for about twenty dollars. Here, more or less, you can make a weapon that works quite well.

I've seen cheaper guns online for around $180, so I'm pretty happy with this build, but before I jump in and show you how to build it, let me. I'll show you in action and the results I got and then I'll go over each component. Okay, so let's start looking at what's inside this box and how to build it now. I really think this is just the intelligence of this particular setup, it really isn't. how complex, I was quite surprised at how simple it was to create this particular box, other than the input jack that I took to be able to plug in a plug pack without wiring it and this particular switch, the two components in here, cost about nine dollars to being able to make the box itself is just an old junction box.

They had the electrical junction box that I had from some previous work I had done around the house and I just put two little pieces of wood in there just to You'll be able to do it on the cheap. These cables here I think I saw some from an old washing machine. I just pulled out these particular cables and have tried to keep all the colors consistent so you can see them. how all the wires connect so this particular wire is the positive one now this connects to the gun and this is the negative wire and I connect it to the workpiece so let's describe what's inside this box.

Now it's really quite simple, there are actually two, just two. modules in this particular box here now this first module here this module I think I bought it for about five dollars 5.20 or so and I bought it in China this is a Taser module now what it says in the particular ad is that you puts We can put up to seven volts on this side, we'll just put four and out on that side, when you do seven, you can get 400,000 or 400 kilovolts on this side, so I don't have the instruments to be able to measure. What I'm getting here, but you'll be able to see some sparks flying in a moment.

What I did initially when I did this was I set up this particular module on this bench power supply here and I think it was just powering. There was four volts here, but I blew up the first one and I think what happened there was that these two wires, the high voltage wires, touch each other at some particular point and when they touch, a flood of current goes through this module. , so high amps and it got destroyed, so what I did was I bought this particular module here, so I think I bought it for around 3.50, so together I think these two are around nine dollars again in China .

I bought several of them, but what? This is also known as a buck converter, so essentially what it does is step up the higher voltage from this side to a lower voltage on this side. Now the thing is that with this particular one here it has another special feature on that. It also limits the current that goes through, so they use them to charge lithium batteries primarily, so what happens here is a power on on this, here I'm going to supply 12 volts, here we'll limit it to 4 volts and 2.5 amps to come out of this particular side, so here is the yellow wire and the blue wire, the yellow goes to the red positive wire on this particular module and the blue wire or the negative on this side goes out to the green wire here, so What I do here is I follow the red wire and I assume that on this particular side, which is the side closest to the camera, is the positive wire, so I connected a yellow wire from the box on that particular side. and then it goes to the gun and then I connect the blue wire to make it consistent here, then it goes to the workpiece and those little clamps, so I guess there's nothing more to show you than this particular thing in action.

If I turn it on, it will make noise for a good second, but what you will see is a spark jump. All I've done here is tape it down with a bit of tape in a space of one. centimeter to be able to show that high voltage, so if we turn it on, wow, that's very loud, so the reason it does that is because they are very close, the schools here use these for high voltage modules to be able to show these arcs on that particular one and what it does is it ionizes the air etc. but what we can use it for is to be able to ionize the powder when it comes out of the gun so it can then stick to the workpiece so let me show you how to set this particular one up. . module now, these little modules are really easy to set up, which you're going to need to be able to do it, although here's a multimedia and I'll talk about it, so if you've never used one of these, I'll talk about the configurations. you need to put it on to be able to set this up.

I'm also going to use my variable bench power supply here because I want to be able to vary the voltage so I can show you one of the features of this little board. The other thing you will also need is a charge. What I'm using here is a small old CPU fan. What you can see here is that it is 12 volts and runs at about 1.9 watts. Apologies for being backwards. It was just easier for me to set it up this particular way. Now this particular board has a couple of features, so here's one that's actually a little bit closer, so on this particular side this is where I put the red wire and the blue wire. so the red wire here is coming from your power supply, so in this particular case I'm going to use it on my variable bench power supply at 12 volts so it comes in here, this is where we'll adjust the voltage on this first particular potentiometer. here the second one here is where we're going to adjust the current and then we're going to get the output voltage of 4 volts and 2.5 amps on this particular side so in order to set that up let's turn on our bench setup power supply here so I'm going to turn it up to about 12 volts here so you can see the particular needle moving up and you can hear the fan running.

Now what I need to be able to do is be able to see this voltage on this side go down. down, so what I've done here is on my particular multimeter. I'm going to connect this red wire here on the lower voltage side and I'm going to turn it to a 20 volt DC measurement on this particular one. side and I'm going to trim, see how I have the yellow wire going into this particular clamp here and running to the positive side of this little fan, so I'm going to put the positive or red wire. Here and on this side here is where I have the negative cable attached.

This one is on the output side and I'm going to attach it here, so what you should see here is it jumps up to 12 volts there. Now what we're going to be able to do here is take this little screwdriver and put it in this first little pot. Here we're going to start turning it counterclockwise, so that's now going to start doing. It may take a little while because they are always set when you get them up to the maximum voltage, so what we're going to do is start turning it anti-closed clockwise until the voltage starts to power up. go down now you'll start to hear the fan you'll see the fan here you'll hear the fan the rpm's are changing here so I'm going to continue until I turn it all the way down to four volts continue so it doesn't have to be perfect, but we'll get it down to about four volts so we can speed up. the Taser module, so I'm pretty happy with that.

Okay, now what we're going to be able to do. What you need to do now is configure the current. The reason we're setting the current is that if the two wires or the workpiece and the actual gun touch, you can actually short circuit the particular circuit, you'll generate too much voltage or too much. amperage there and that module will destroy itself, so the next particular feature here is to be able to resort now to limit the current here, so what I'm going to do is turn off the power supply on the bank. And this thing here now is still running in parallel, but what I'm going to do is we're actually going to shorten it, so what's going to happen here is this fan is not going to spin because all the current is running. to go through here to the multimeter and back to the right, so in order to do that I need to reconfigure by changing this particular plug to the other side towards the 10 amp fuse side and now change this completely. around the amp measurement settings so here you can see 10 amps hopefully you can see it on the screen so when you turn it back on you should see it jump back to uh leave about five oh in there. you go about six amps to the right and what you may not be able to see is that there are actually three LEDs on these particular modules, so on the particular module here you can see that there is a red, blue and green LED, so get back here.

You should be able to see that the red LED is a light and what that says is that it's holding current at 5.7 amps, so in this second pot here now we're going to turn it counterclockwise. and we should be able to see the current start to decrease again so we can see that it is 5 and I'm going to reduce it down to 2.5 because that is the limit that I found for these particular modules. they seem to work very well on um and they don't seem to destroy themselves under this so I take it down, down, get closer and there we are, so now it's ready to be able to have it. it's limiting the current notice again that this fan is not spinning because all the current is going over here and this is essentially where all the loads are measured from, so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to turn it off and Now I'll be able to go back to this particular setting. where I'm measuring the voltage, so come back here to 20 and I'm going to turn it back on, so this is the feature I wanted to be able to show you. this now makes it spin silently because it now runs at 4 volts, but it doesn't limit the current because this thing barely draws anything now.

What's really interesting here is the nice thing about this, as long as the voltage on this particular side is higher than the output voltage here it will maintain that particular regulation, so for that module that I created, I just used a modem, a power supply from an old old internet modem and this is what I'm using to be able to power my powder coating gun so you can see here you should be able to see here the output here is 12 volts and 2, 5 amps, so what you need to do is if you're going to select one of these particular plugs. packs, you want to make sure they're 2.5 amps or more because this is what we're running it at here, but here it runs at 12 volts, but what if you have a three amp plug, let's say, but at 10 or 15 ?

The point here is that we should be able to see if we can focus it. Here, with this particular module, I see that I have it at four points, 4.4.04 volts, even if I turn it down, so I'm going to go down. You should see the needle go down to about six, but look, it's still four volts and again at the same time I can take it up to about 15 or let's even push it into the red, so it's 24. So what this is really doing is holding this little fan at four volts, regardless of voltages, as long as it is greater than four volts and does not exceed the supplier's recommended voltage input, this is how this particular module is configured.

I guess all that's left to do is talk about the gun itself and how I made it so that the gun is actually just a reusable bottle, some PV seat accessories, and this particular handle, I think, like I said before, you could pick one of these handles are about ten dollars just unscrew the fitting that comes with it and you can put this quarter inch fitting in there so let's start with the bottle. The reason I chose this particular bottle is because of the tapered neck it has. I found that when I used a jar of peanut butter etc. with one inlet and one outlet, it created too many swirls, so when I use this particular one here, what I find is really cool, do you have this particular rod here holding the tube in the center of the bottle, then itinflates, runs evenly along the edges, tapers up and across, and then exits the gun through the electrostatic chamber.

Now the other thing that is really useful about using this particular type of bottles is that you can buy several of them and by doing so you can store your powders in them without having to change them and clean them etc. So here is the powder I used in that particular video in the beginning, now I keep it in my shed with the other bottles as I get various different powders. I'll store different powders in there and when I need it, I'll just plug it in, use it, and take it out. and put it back and clean the gun, ready for another color, okay, so this particular tube that goes down is nothing more than a simple clear vinyl tube that you can buy at a hardware store, it weighs six thousand and the particular rod that we have here.

What I have is just an aluminum welding rod that I had and all I did here is just hook it up and go down, so I created a little hook and drilled a hole. there and all you have to do is hold it straight so it's in the center of the bottle at the bottom and I just used electrical tape so I can tape it down, I'll see how that works. goes now, you may have bought one of those 21 nitto parts before for your air compressor and what tends to come with that is one of these little quarter inch male fittings to mount on and that's all there is here in this particular. head over here so this is just 18 mil pressure PVC and this is just a cap and a tee joint that's all you really need so all I did there was drill a hole in the top of this particular cap and it's just a little bit smaller than the threads here and as I was working it, it just hit itself and because I was running psi here so low or low pressure, it doesn't cause any problems, it doesn't seem to cause a problem, so I put some Teflon tape here to be able to stop this particular side and then be able to snap it onto this particular piece, what happens is the six mil just presses pretty easily onto this particular piece, it just I thought I'd do it ahead of time so you can You can see me struggling to be able to do that in this video, so all that happens here is it connects to the cap, it gets to that T joint and then it goes down in this particular direction here now to stop the dust as I started to climb up and out, the gum collected back here and clumped together.

All I did was create a little kind of conical silicon inside there. I just injected silicon in there and used a powder. pop stick so I can smooth it out and be able to create that particular concave outlet so it comes back up this way, it gets a little bit powdery because it's a little bit sticky, but I only have a powder on it for the moment, we'll see how it goes. My particular thought is that I may change the settings on this gun a couple of times because the real intelligence type of this unit is that high voltage box that we set up earlier, so as I pull this.

Here this is actually the electrostatic chamber and all you have here is again it's 18 mil PVC and it has a brass welding rod that I decided to be able to use here. I just drilled a hole. at the top here and I have it as an l. I'll take it out in a second. I just have one l here and this is where I hook the positive clip of that high voltage module, so I have I have little alligator clips in there, I just put them here on the yellow or positive side and this thing creates, steals the ion, so it charges as it comes out and then sticks to the work piece, so you have to connect the blue. cable to the workpiece itself, so everything that happens here, as you can see down there, I'm just going to open up and pull this out so I can show you what's okay, so it's just some PVC. pipe um and what I've done here is this is the um, the aluminum fastener, uh, what is this brass reinforcing rod?

So all I did here was just bend it 90 degrees so it could really fit nice and easily down there so I could then find that hole and then push it through and I just cut off some other little bits and created these little tiny shades and so they were on the width of this particular pipe, uh, and so it is just with a little bit of pressure. against it and I just soldered the ones here, I'm sure I could have done better, but it works, it sticks really well there, so when we push it in, you can see it just sits and somehow stays nice and firm there so the two of them can hold on here at this particular point there and then join that gun, so that in itself is a very simplistic explanation regarding the gun and how it works, so say that.

All in all, it's a pretty inexpensive setup and it seems to be getting really fantastic results. Please leave me comments. Don't forget to like the video if you think it's cool. I'd love to see the things you've created with this particular weapon and let me know of your successes or failures.