Garage ventilation

Hi! Dne’ here! I hope you’re liking my Classic Cars and Tools site! ; ) Like most home bodied DIY’ers, we look for ways to make the best of what we have, even to the point of “invention”! My large two car garage is large enough to do a smaller car like my mustang, but ventilation is key with the paint made today, and keeping the air clean, and our lungs being clear of chemicals is equally important! Even spraying paints bought at parts stores or hardware stores are dangerous to breathe!

I started off with just a general shop fan to oust dust from sanding, or after spray from spraying primers, but I knew I had to do something better.

Ventilation! I made a system using two shop fans, and the clear part being plexiglass to allow light to be let in. If the fans were being used to exhaust dust, I didn’t use filters, but when paints, primers were sprayed, paint booth filters were put over the fans and secured by chicken wire. These two fans created a suction that would shut the entrance door to the garage!

The mustang being re-coated. I would spray the garage floor with the garden hose to keep dust down.

Fresh air-breathing systems are a must! I was just spraying some smaller parts with  primer using the fresh air system over my mouth and nose in this photo. The fresh air is supplied from a clean zone, in this case, from my air-conditioned other room for cool air.

It was nice inside the garage as a nice “breeze” was created and a nice lull of the fans was constant.

With a little imagination, a nearby Lowe’s or Home depot, I bought my materials to make my ventilation system. The construction is of 1″x 2″‘s, already mentioned, the clear parts are made of plexiglass to allow light in. My garage door is 17’ wide, so I made two sections that could be unbolted from one another and stored for future use. For the rest of sealing the garage, I used blue tape to seal the edges of the garage door to the wood, and the gap at the top of the garage door was sealed by ceiling panels. The fans are sealed to the openings with pipe insulation then the fans are held in place by elastic straps.

Here you can see my panels out-of-the-way. I’ll probably never use them again, but who knows!

Here, the car was still being prepped before shooting any color. I have a box of paint booth filters that I purchased from Ebay, enough to last my short painting career and then some. This is just a one time deal, I’ll hopefully never paint another car.

Here, I have painted what you see~ the inlet for fresh air comes from the room behind my shop. Those windows are filtered to trap other unwanted particles.

Though my garage is a large two car, it’s still tight! But the end results were marvelous!

It was fun to paint my Mustang, but I found it to be more work than I had anticipated or had the funding for.  Again, I hope you found this interesting and perhaps lead you to make a ventilation system for your own workshop!  ; )