So, I'm going to talk about, you know, what tips I use when it comes to spraying an exterior. This is going to go for all the paints and stains I use on the exterior body of a house or say a log cabinet, etc., I use a 515. This is an exit flex 515. I use that on everything that's the body of the house. If I spray uh gutters, I'll use a 310. If I spray a front door, I'll use a 310. The only tips I use is a 515 and a 310 on an exterior. I started out spraying with a 517. The larger the tip, the faster you can paint. The faster you can paint, the more money you're going to make. But the problem with going up in tip size and um painting faster, one of the inherent things you get with that is you get overspray. Overspray and fallout equates to um loss material. And with today's paints, the paints have just skyrocketed over the years. You know, one of the paints I'm using now is it's approximately $100 a gallon. if I lose, you know, a gallon in overspray, which is very easy to do. That's a hundred bucks out of my pocket. So, with all that said, I eventually graduated back down to a 515. A 515, it's so much easier to control overspray. Today's a windy day. I don't want to get overspray on that door, otherwise I'm going to be getting crocodile cloths and cleaning it off. That's a powder coated door that we're not going to be painting. I've sprayed with a 515, you know, on windy windy days, and I've never once had an overspray claim, you know, in my career. One of the other things you'll get with larger tips is the more possibilities of runs and sags. You are getting a lot of paint on there, but one of the other things is is that TDS specifies, you know, how much paint you need to put on there, you know, for the paint and for the paint to perform better. What you could end up getting is more paint the heavier it gets. If it gets too heavy, you can get like crinkling and what we call like alligator peeling and stuff. So, there are issues that come with putting on the paint too heavy. You want to apply it on, you know, per the specifications, you know, for a lot of different reasons. So, if you try to go down, say a smaller tip size, you might not be getting on enough paint. The paint won't perform. If you end up having a warranty claim, they'll come out, test the mill thickness of the paint. It's not the proper mill thickness and they're not going to cover the warranty. When I'm spraying, I'm using a proper method. I spray and I overlap 50%. When I tested it with a mill gauge, I would be getting the mill thickness that I want that is, you know, that goes by the specifications in the TDS. Over the years, I've used a lot of different manufacturers of tips. You know, there's Graco, there's Titan, there's Bedford, there's Trit. Exit Flex now makes tips. uh Swiss technology over the years, you know, I've kind of like had my favorites of tips. Tips started graduating to low pressure tips and low pressure tips I typically run like right now I'm running a Tri-C T5 back there. I'm running at 2200 PSI. The low pressure tips are running around 800 to,00 1200 PSI. What they said is you're going to have less o overspray and you're going to have less tip wear. So, your tips are going to last longer. What I found is you had more overspray and I found that the tips would wear, you know, even faster. And the reason why I feel like there's more overspray when you have lower pressure, the atomization of the paint, the droplets are a lot bigger on low pressure tips. And what I notice is when I'm spraying with low pressure tips, especially overhead, um I feel paint raining down on me. So, I um like regular production tips, not low pressure tips. I like exit flex tips. I think they're spray their spray fan without fingering, no fingering, a perfect graduated pattern on there. It gives you a good even spray surface. Love the tips. Um and paired with a TriC T5. I was using the same tips with a Titan uh 440X. and the Titan 440X does have fingering issues because of the fluctuations and the pressure on it. So, that's just a little bit about why I use a 515 spraying exteriors to give you a little insight and maybe, you know, help you out choose what, you know, what you want to spray your exteriors with.
