How to Spray Ceilings Without Lap Marks | Flawless Airless Finish Tips & Tricks

All right, today I'm going to be talking about tip spray and interior ceilings. Now, ceilings can be one of the most challenging things you can ever paint a let alone spray. So I'm going to give you some tips so you could end up getting professional results. Your ceilings will have a nice scene all the way across it. You're not going to have lap marks, you're not going to have flashing on it. Hopefully with these tips. So, first thing I'm going to talk about is a spray and the ceilings within airless sprayer. And what tip I would use. The tips I would use are Titan HEA tips. If you have the spray ceilings, those tips are going to be the tip that will give you the most success. And why is that? Titan HE tips have a nice feathered edge to them. They're high efficiency airless tips and they run at low pressures. And just the way they were designed, they don't have like kind of a sharp edge to them. Which you can get a fingering, tailing, a lot of issues with just typical production tips. HEA tips, the only place I like really using them is spraying interior walls. And I love them for spraying interior ceilings. The next thing is is having a tip big enough to get enough product on there that it doesn't dry too fast because ceilings are inherently really warm. Harder than it is down here. And so you're going to run into your problems with your paint drying too fast and not getting like a good gel coat on it. And a good even finish allowing it to dry without having lap marks. And what we call like feathering and even holidays, etc., stuff like that. So Titan HEA tips, if I had one tip to shoot ceilings with, I'd probably choose a 619. If you're uncomfortable using a tip, you know, that large, I'd probably drop down to a 517. So a 619, 517, if you're comfortable shooting bigger, you could jump into like a 1221 that's going to shoot you a huge pattern and you can shoot your ceilings super fast. But that's probably going to be for new construction. Even new construction, I'd be using probably a 619. A repaint, I'd be doing a 619 also. So now I got the tip, I've got an airless sprayer. You're typically going to run, if you're running the tip, I recommend. You're going to be running your pressure somewhere between 800 and 1,100 psi. When I spray a ceilings, I typically don't release the triggers. So I want it running at that pressure while I'm pulling the trigger. If you're releasing your trigger, the pump has a tendency to build that pressure, etc. And so you want it while you're pulling the trigger to be around that 800 to 1,100 psi. I would prefer somewhere if you can just get it nailed down to 1,000 psi. That would probably be what you would want. Once I get ready to spray the ceilings, I'm always spraying with some form of extension. So I don't have to reach really high to spray the extension. And it's not like a lot of work on my shoulder. I want an extension that's going to give me the ability to hold my arm in a locked position like this and spray the ceiling. So I got an extension on my gun. This ceiling right here, I'd probably want a little bit longer extension than I got. I got longer extensions. This one's getting right about where I want it. So you can see the difference in these two extensions for this ceiling. I'd probably be using that extension. So now I got my gun. I got my extension. I'll tell you, give you some tips, spraying. Now if you have the ability to spray from what we call logical start and stop points, that's from one end of the room to the other end of the room. You're going to have success spray and ceilings. If you have to stop someplace in the middle of the room because of a bed, because of furniture, because of a sprayer, a pallet of tile in the middle, whatever, it may be. You're going to have a start and stop in the middle of the room. That's going to be a spot where you're going to be overlap. And it's going to have a different amount of paint than the rest of your 50% overlaps around the room. And that's going to make it difficult to have success painting ceilings. Sometimes there's nothing you can do about it. And if you have those overlaps in the middle of the room where you can't walk the entire distance, you're going to come down. And you're going to, instead of just a hard stop and go back, you're going to feather it out. My gun's going to come down. I'm going to send my spray pattern down. And then I'm going to come back up and it allows it to feather it out. And I come back the other side. I'm going to do the opposite side so it's feathering it out, not leaving a hard stop and start and stop right in the middle of the ceiling. So wherever that may happen, you'll want to keep that in mind. So now a new construction, I always have the ability to walk from your logical start and stops. And it's changing on this ceiling all over the place. But I still can just walk. And I'm going to be start one corner. I'm going to start just working my way this direction. I'm going to start my first pass. My first pass is going to be a double pass, because as I overlap 50%, everything's getting two coats of paint. Your first pass, your first lap won't get two coats. Two passes and then begin overlapping 50%. Your 50% overlap is extremely important. Because what that's doing, you're overlapping. So if my spray patterns, you know, this big, I'm going to move over next and I'm going to overlap at 50%. You're getting a nice thick coat of paint. The worst thing you can do in a ceiling is go too fast, not overlap properly, and have thick layers of paint, thin layers of paint, and it'll all dry unevenly. And that's what you're eventually going to see has a lot marks in your ceiling. So your 50% has to be equal across the board. Hopefully you have the right lighting where you can see that. And then your pace. So once I begin spraying, I'm going to be just walking in a specific pace, watching the paint hit the ceiling and watching that I'm getting a good saturated coat onto the ceiling. If you're walking too fast, you'll notice it if you're watching it. You can see it. You can hear it as the paint's coming out. I can hear the sprayer how hard the sprayer's working. But I'm paying really close attention seeing that paint going, okay, it looks like it's getting really saturated, really good, it looks really wet. You want it to look sopping wet as what you want. I get to the end, I come across, I start backing up, and I start doing my 50% overlap. I'm watching that overlap, making sure it's overlapping, the 50%, I'm making sure it's saturated. And as I'm working down my ceiling, I'm looking at what I've just done also to make sure it all looks super wet. If I see any spot that looks like I went too fast, or I didn't overlap good enough while it's sopping wet, you can go hit it again. If you wait till the end and it all dries, and you realize you had something that wasn't coated as well, and you go back and try to hit that again after it's already drying, you're probably going to get a big flashing spot in the middle of your ceiling. So it's better to get too much on than not enough on. It really comes down to your pace. You want to walk a slow pace, you want to make sure you overlap 50%. If you keep all those things in mind, you'll have success, you'll spray in your ceilings. Paint, I'll talk a little bit about paint. The type of paint you put on the ceiling, the flat of the sheen, the more success you are going to have, you know, spraying ceilings, the higher the sheen, the more likelihood you're going to see your airs or light spots or holidays, etc. The higher the sheen, the more impact and perfection you will see. So I really like flat on ceilings just for that reason. So flat or matte works well for ceilings. If you start to get up into a sat and sheen on a sat and on a sheen on a ceiling, you are going to have to just take all these things like, you know, talk about and make sure they're implemented 100%. The other thing is temperature, turn the heat down. You don't want what you don't want is the overspray, the dust, the silica dust, etc. going into the return air, messing up your heater. So you want your room to be cooled down and not super hot because your hot air rises, the ceilings are hot, the slower they dry, the more likelihood you are going to have success spraying them. So turn the heater off way before you get ready to just do a ceiling if you want to have success. So there's some of my tips and tricks, you know, that I use when it comes to spraying ceilings, do have success spraying them. And hopefully you can take something from that and improve your ceiling spraying yourself.