What To Clean An HVLP Spray Gun With

[Applause] all right today I'm here in Vista California with the owner of Apollo spray sprayers John Derek so John uh you know I want to talk a little bit about we've got the Apollo atomizer 7700 gun and I want to talk about cleaning this gun because it is important to maintain it it is important to clean it and um maybe it might be important to lube it so you know can you give me um kind of like the rundown on how you would go about cleaning this gun say for instance um I'm using I use a lot of 2K polyes and they're water-based products you know what would I clean with and what would I not clean with that might cause some problems so good question Chris so there's a lot of uh stainless steel in the atomizer gun which really helps to clean uh to keep the gun in good order so it's not going to uh grab onto the Coatings and things like that so having good materials in the gun helps a lot but with the water-based materials the really the best thing to clean it up with is Believe it or not just some dishwashing soap and some good oldfashioned warm water and I love to just run it through with some warm water some dishwashing soap that usually grabs the material and pulls it out of the passageways and then there's certain components in that that you want to take apart on the gun to make sure that you're cleaning them properly but uh using things like lacquer thinner with water Bo with waterborne finishes is going to be a big no no a lot of people tend to try to do that but a lot if you've ever tried to do that lacquer thinner will not only make the water based materials gum up in many ways and not actually break them down and clean them but it actually lacer thinner leaves an oily residue in the spray gun as well so if you go back and you spray a water-based material after you've cleaned your gun with a lacer thinner you're going to end up pulling those that oily residue out of the gun with your uh material and it's going to end up causing all kinds of problems with contamination on your surface as we commonly call fisheye right so to avoid that what I like to do is when I'm done cleaning up and for me because I spray a lot of different kinds of paints I spraying water borns solvent borns all day long so I have to make sure that my gun is completely compatible with both types of finishes right and so the best thing to do if you want to make sure that your gun is compatible with the most types of finishes on the market is to use acetone so I do a general cleanup with uh if it's a solvent born I will use lacquer thinner or if it's water born as we were talking about then I'll use the just the warm water and some dishwashing soap then I'll flush out afterwards with a little bit of acetone and what the acetone will do is pull out any oil that's in there that's left over from the lacer thin or if I use that to clean or in vice versa it'll pull the water out of the gun too so that it's not leaving it in the gun to uh evaporate and leave any um water deposits or anything like that inside the gun so keeping the gun clean and using it with acetone is is key to to keeping it in good shape all right John thank you very much for giving us some tips and tricks on how to clean the 7700 atomizer gun so if you got any questions or comments for John or I just leave it down in the comment section below we'll try to get uh to that section answer those questions and com comments don't forget if you like the video give us a thumbs up we'd appreciate it very much