Trouble Shooting Airless Paint Sprayers

this is Krista had a whole painter here on home improvement how to's today we're going to show you how to troubleshoot an airless sprayer that's not priming BAM alright so here we are today I was rolling balls with our Draco 395 we were using the pressure roller and suddenly the thing just stopped working no more pressure and it was cycling like it lost its prime walked over here the sprayer simple little troubleshooting tips just I thought I just lost its prime for some reason it was gonna just hit the prime reprime it and away I go and then the thing didn't work so we're gonna walk you through some of the troubleshooting process now we haven't even fixed this thing I called done over here got journeyman John here and we're gonna just go walk you through the steps that we would go through troubleshooting this airless sprayer right here after it it's not primed and one of the first things I did I once a twin prime just by flipping the prime knob down and flipping it back up it wouldn't build pressure back up so it was lacking pressure I thought maybe the intake tube right here would be clogged with some paint film maybe that was in the paint which we we just call it dirty paint so I lifted up the intake tube and there was a few little chunks of paint on this intake tube but I was thinking maybe there's gonna be something completely covering the intake tube where it couldn't suck up paint and I looked at the end of the prime plane just make sure nothing's on the prime thing right on the prime tube where paint would come out and just make sure no nothing was obstructing both of those tubes and nothing was obstructing them and so now we gotta begin looking at the sprayer you got any thoughts John you know like you said you check if your paint is dirty that's going to give you some hints about what problems you're gonna be having typically if it's raining like that it's just running it's not building any pressure but there's a little seat ball inside the piston there if that's not seating all the way because there's a little piece of paint blocking it it's not going to build pressure but still run but it won't build pressure so one of the ways you can kind of start to figure that out too is does it crime or not so when you flip it over to Primus they're fluid coming out of that frying section and that's a good point that John brought up when I would crime and I would flip it over to crime there should be you know a constant steady flow of paint coming out of here in there was none I think we can power on and we can show you that John so there's paint just dripping off cuz there's paint on the tube but there's no paint actually flowing out of the prime tube and he's got the prime knob pointing down and that's prime so we know it's not priming no paint is flowing through here so my initial thoughts were that something is stuck on the plane by the valve on pain valve itself so maybe some paint film that was built up on this tube or something smaller than the rock screen got through the intake tube and stopped and clogged that ball and it's interesting we've had weird things like a peanut blade of grass come through the intake tube and get in there and get stuck between the ball the blade of grass is stuck there and that would stop the ball from falling down in CD and they got this little round ball like a marble in there and that things just not seeding and that could be one of the things so we're gonna begin taking this apart and we're gonna show you just the simple process of troubleshooting that unfortunately there's no easy clean way to doing there to get paint on your hands we're on a tile form right here we were sitting on you know red laws in the paper but it's gonna be a good idea to have a drop cloth because when you take this off your paint is going to come off so I'm gonna grab a drop off set that under there and we're gonna show you how simple it is to just check that ball and see what and we're gonna show you what we find in there if we find anything so a couple simple tools that you may need for repairing your sprayer is a crescent wrench a small pair of needle nose pliers or tweezers some piston loop or tear cell look loop to lubricate your parts before putting your sprayer back together and don't forget if you enjoy our videos or the videos series what we put out please consider subscribing to our Channel check us out on Instagram and Facebook because we've got more cool tips and tricks like this that we're posting all the time subscribe BAM myself a drop off I'm just gonna want to lay this drop cloth out right here the paint got on the tile floor it easily just wipes right off no big deal but it really looks good to the customer if the customer walks in everything's sitting on a drop cloth the original customer around this house we're working on another multi-million dollar home here customers gone for a week so we're not worrying about that but here we go so we're gonna begin the process of checking this ball and this is our lower in section right here we're gonna have a ball seat down here we're just going to remove this and one of the nice things about these sprayers is a lot of the times you don't need any tools we haven't took in this one apart so from the factory it might be really tight but typically we could just grab and use our hands to untighten everything and then we just tighten it back up with our hands so we don't need to go grab a whole lot of tools to look at this and repair this but here we go we've got the sprayer right here and we're gonna test it out to see if it's hand tight or not and it looks like it is in height sitting a little knot right there I mean that's like all fit I don't know I mean you call that it looks like so you're just gonna wiggle it and so John's wiggling it and he's got it took it off right there and now the first thing we're gonna do down inside here I'm gonna look inside this tube and a lot of times this is more less a brand new sprayer and we've only used it you know it's been used for a few weeks so I wouldn't think there would be a lot of paint buildup film but a lot of times if this is an older spare a couple years old there might be a big chunk of paint film and you'll see it inside there and you can grab it and just pull it right out I don't see anything I'm just gonna take and dump this and check to see if I see anything up in there and I don't see anything up there I'm going to just clean this back up right here because this is gonna end up going back on there so I make sure it's nice and clean before you put it back on there did you see anything up inside I think found our culprit gave me that John just thinks he's found something that's how simple it could be sometimes sometimes it's really fast and simple I would say most of the time it's as simple as pulling this thing off looking up there and you're gonna see some in a lot of times John he carries a tool belt or a bag I used to wear a bag tool bag a lot but because of the video and all that stuff I'm not doing it as much but I always had a pair of tweezers in mind because you can just reach up there with the tweezers or I had a small pair of small needlenose here's the hole you can't get both fingers up there and say grab a blade of grass and so John has found something let's see what you've found John do we want to try to zoom in here let me it's right I'm gonna get a little zoom in here and show you what we found okay here we go we got this thing and we think we discovered the culprit here in let's John why don't you go ahead and pull out we've got just a small set of needlenose pliers here we're gonna take that and gently pull out that big dad manage an ax so there would be the culprit and that thing that's a big clump of paint like skimmed paint and that would probably be a buildup of what was inside the hose and more likely I'm going to show you what happens is a lot of if you don't clean the sprayers out really really good you're gonna get paint in the paint settling down in the track right there and it begins to develop a film and then that film will eventually break free and then go up into the ball and clog the ball so John's got a good section because there's no way that could have actually passed through the rock guard so it has to be be between the rock guard and the ball itself absolutely incredible and that's how simple that was John's gonna look under there see if he can find any more the pull out and then we're gonna put this thing back together and see if it runs so now we hold it off we can put this back together and more likely it's gonna work right now but we're just gonna take off cuz there was some of the paint film and it actually passed beyond the ball and it was on the other side of the ball and once we fired this thing up that would probably just continue through and then get trapped in the manifold filter but Jones want me to play around a little bit more and take it all apart so typically typically this would be just hand tight to from the factory it was pretty tight but we wanted to take it apart and show you if if that didn't work or if something was beyond there then how you would check it but now we've got this lower section off there and the ball is inside there kind of a steel ball and there's a bunch more stuff that passed beyond that steel ball so you know you'll drop that little valve ball out there's going to be a little ring you lift that guy up and that's gonna free up all of that fun so all this stuff there you go this was all wrapped around the ball itself so I think it was a good thing that John pulled this section off because I don't think it was all wrapped around the ball I don't think that would have come off if we would have fired it back up that's that's an extreme case I don't know if I've ever seen a case in all my years no it was interior paint with interior paint with it all wrapped around the ball like that this you don't want to throw it back in your paint you want to get rid of it so come on I go rinse this off and we'll show you how to put it back together and you'll get this bad boy going again there you go don't drop the ball down the drain or in the grass bad bad things happen when you do that so in the way this is gonna go you're just gonna take that ball make sure it's all clean not scratched up it drops in there this guy drops on top drop that ball in then this is gonna go it's gonna seat right in there it's gonna look kind of like a four-leaf clover with that ball in there and then that ball when that when that vacuum is created it pulls that ball up pulls the fluid but then when that piston comes back down it pushes that ball down and that's what's gonna pressurize the paint so when a piece of paint gets a dry paint or grass gets stuck on that ball it can't pressurize stuff keeps escaping out the side that's where it'll just keep cycling and losing its prime so now we got this thing all cleaned off you're going to begin putting it back together and prior to putting it back together you want to make sure this is all cleaned really well make sure it's all wiped off no paint on that and one of the things we like to do is just take piston moves so we got some piston move right here and I like to rub some piston lube on the threads in here the threads both sides and one of the things that we'll do that will help fight corrosion and it'll help keep it from from sealing or protein on there locking itself on there so we're just gonna put a little drop of piston lube on there and then thread it on and that is it also if there's any paint on there on the threads and all anywhere it's gonna help keep that paint from drying and sealing those threads on there and making it really hard to take this thing off because it's gonna be on there from we don't take them off that often so it's easy for that thing to just tighten itself on there it gets ease down there pro did on there over a period of time so just a little bit of piston Lube put some piston Lube right there you can also use throat seal which is the same thing whatever you are typically lubricating your piston with so we've got our piston right here we're lubricating those things on a daily basis so there we go got that on now we're just gonna put our intake tube back on gonna wipe that off it's just gonna push right in this intake tube also it has two little wings on there and those o-rings this is a fairly new sprayer it's not brand new but we use it for a few x-series and I believe I think we haven't had it that long but you know those o-rings right now that they're nice and soft lubricated but you can also use some piston Lube or something to lubricate those or even some some lube for like silicone lube to make sure those things are lubricated after about a year so I probably lubricate them if I took this thing off again but we didn't need to do on the nice and soft brand-new so there we go tip that thing back up and I would assume this thing's gonna fire back up and be good to go if not then we would continue the troubleshooting process from there but what do you think like what percentage of the time that we run into these issues with it not priming is that the issue typically that's going to be the issue usually we're using something like usually we'll see in our next earier paint that dries really fast and it'll be a hot day it'll dry inside that siphon tube and usually this will fix it if it keeps happening again that's gonna be kind of an indicator that there's a lot of dried paint in here that's starting to come off we didn't have that happen one time where I think we spent two hours trying to get a pump to work because it kept breaking off little pieces up into that ball valve and we have to keep clearing it out at that point it might be time to switch over to a different pump or replace that siphon valve but usually your your local paint stores will carry extra parts for things like that in that that's an issue you'll run into on what I notice is if you're crossed using products from water-based products to like lacquer based products or oil based products you're gonna run into issues like that and that's why we never use a lacquer base prog lager based pump or lacquer based product with an oil-based product or a water-based product down the road down we have separate pumps for each one of those things so you can do it but you could run into problems down the road if this this didn't fix the situation another thing we're gonna probably maybe jump down to is look and pop in the prime valve off and looking at that but that would be another video another series because it's that's not very common with newer sprayers I mean if this sprayer was you know tenure or five years old or more we might start running and do issues like back as a lot more stuff tiny little things might get through the hose get through the piston then they get stuck in that valve and usually with something like that it won't lose its prime what you'll have a hard time doing is getting it to prime and so usually you can kind of finagle it a little bit and get it so that it does catch a prime and hold pressure but if it just won't hold pressure at all usually it has to do with that little ball valve down there so we'll come out with another video here in the near future working on that prime valve hopefully you've enjoyed this video hopefully it's gonna help you get up and running fast and start making money again okay let's go [Music] [Applause] [Music] let's go make some money [Music]