Silverstone Raven 2 Casemod

I am not a professional painter by trade but have painted cars, trucks, motorcycles and computer cases in the past and only once has the item actually been in a ventilated paint booth.  Normally what I do is create a clean room environment using heavy clear plastic which is designed to keep dust off my work and overspray off my stuff.  Because of this you can’t really call it a "paint booth" but for argument sake that is the term I am going with.

My garage has a finished ceiling and for cosmetic reasons I didn’t want to attach 2x4’s to the rafters just to hang my plastic.  Instead I decided to cut down my golf driving net and use that to drape the plastic over. 

These poles are 10 foot lengths of EMT conduit so cutting them down to the desired length wasn't too difficult.  Sadly if I ever want to setup the driving net again I'll need some couplings or will have to buy new legs.

As you can see I have used this plastic before so there are a few holes and tears but, if you keep the plastic clean it can be reused many times.  The biggest issue with reusing plastic is that it tends to generate a static charge and will attract all sorts of dust particles that later flake off and get into your work. 

It took a total of two plastic sheets to cover the entire booth and worked out quite well.  To finish the booth I pulled the plastic taunt and wrapped the excess under the metal frame.  I then used hand clamps to keep the plastic from moving around and configured an opening so I could get parts in and out..

The photos in this section were taken from a past casemod article and while the setup was exactly the same the environment wasn’t.  When I painted the Raven 2 and iVektor it was mid November.  Sunlight was at a premium and the high temperature was a blistering 40 F (4 C) making the painting process a little more difficult and time consuming.

To combat the cold I had three heaters in the garage running between paint coats and also set up a ventilation system that should have worked in theory but didn’t really help that much.