Automatic Painter: Is It Feasible?

[Pengwuino]

Hey guys i was wondering something...

First of all, are those systems that 'spray' paint (instead of you having to use a brush/roller) any good? I hear they suck.. but some people say there great (so I am thinken user error?).

Anyhow, if they are good... what's the feasibility in having like a roller system where a motor moves a sprayer across a little track at a constant pace and then at the end of the track, something extends the track into the air a little and the sprayer goes back down the opposite way. This would continue until it had gone all the way up the wall :) How bout it lol.

 

[faust9]

An inkjet printer for walls? What about windows, outlets, and the like?

 

[Pengwuino]

Put tape over outlets. And walls... you just set the track to go up to a distance of the windwos then turn around. Its meant for big open walls :)

 

[Kenneth Mann]

Sounds like an interesting idea, but I see one potential very large political drawback. You'd be taking on the trades. They wouldn't take it sitting down. (Imagine what would happen if you came up with something to put a lot of plumbers out of work.

Also, to make the idea practical I think you'd have to redesign the roller system.

KM

 

[Pengwuino]

Roller as in paint roller or the track? I was going to use a spray :P But thena gain that's probably going to make a mess come to think of it unless I am rather up close.

I don't think id have political problems. A large % of people paint their own houses and this coudl also just be a suplement to subcontractors to help em do the job. Just a fart in the wind though... i wouldn't seriously go try it... or i dunno, who knows D:

 

[Danger]

I'm not sure about the practicality once you factor in how long it will take to set-up/tear-down, as well as the need to clean the nozzles between coats (house paint will clog them if allowed to harden or even thicken).
If you want to take the balls-to-the-wall design approach, you could make the nozzle carrier tilt down into a splash-proof trough and fire a blast of turpentine through. You'd have to make sure that all circuitry is explosion-proof, in that case, since the thinner is extremely flammable. On the same note, how do you plan to switch sources (primer, thinner, paint)? Unless you use separate lines, pumps, nozzles etc., they would have to be purged between sources.
A small laser scanner with logic circuits could be integrated to automatically skip over protrusions on the wall, but that wouldn't stop paint from dripping onto them. As a final note, it should travel from side to side, from the top down, rather than vertically. You don't want to apply new strokes above old ones because the paint can run down and leave an uneven finish.
Something like this would certainly be fun to design, and even cobble together out of whatever is lying around, but I'm a bit hesitant about the commercial application of it.

 

[FredGarvin]

Any form of spray is going to have overspray no matter how concentrated it is. That means if you want to use it indoors, you'll spend massive amounts of time masking everything off that you don't want to get spray on. It doesn't seem worth it to me. A roller is so quick, why change a good thing?

 

[Kenneth Mann]

It might be an interesting exercise, especially for use in large commercial or institutional wall areas, and using self priming rollers. We should assign the guys in this forum the exercise of coming up with it - - - sort of a group design.

KM

 

[Pengwuino]

lol yah, we should all get together and plan out stuff and invent things and all the profit could be split. I mean where else can you so easily find such pools of knowledge with seemingly nothing to do with it :D

 

[Moonbear]

It seems like it's usefulness would depend on how easily it could be assembled (a quickly extended track?) and how versatile it would be for different size rooms. A place where sprayers are often used, and where this might find use, would be in apartments. In large complexes where they paint between every tenant and don't care if they paint over everything (you know those places, where you walk in and every outlet, hinge, door handle, and heating vent is painted over), then they might go for something that they could load their paint in, set it to do a wall, go work on repairs needed in another apartment, come back, move it to the next wall, etc. But only if it can easily move in and out of doorways, and quickly be set for multiple wall sizes, not need babysitting, and be quicker to set up than it is to just paint with a sprayer by hand.

As for sprayers vs rollers, from what I've heard, sprayers take some practice to get a decent coat, but once you've got a knack for it, it's very quick. The overspray is the issue, especially around windows and such, but if you can just tape plastic on the glass and don't care about everything else, they're certainly quick.

However, my own painting experience with rollers is that the painting itself isn't the time-consuming part. Prepping the walls, removing or taping off everything I don't want painted, and waiting for the paint to dry between coats are the time-consuming parts.

Another place this might be useful would be for industrial applications, where you need to paint long stretches of walls in a warehouse/factory space where you'd otherwise need to spend a lot of time setting up scaffolding to paint with rollers or sprayers and climb up and down, etc.

I don't think this would put trades people out of work, because I don't expect it's something your average homeowner would be buying or renting to use, it would be more like another tool for the trades people to make their job faster.

What I'm wondering though is how the sprayer would move? I can envision something that would move up and down, but then how does it move laterally and spray the next section of wall? Or would the sprayer just move up and down, and the base would then be motorized and roll along? So, I guess I'm not envisioning a feasible design (I'll leave that to the engineers to quibble about), but the general idea, if you can come up with a feasible design, might have useful applications at least.

 

[Danger]

Sorry, but I can't resist. This is my professional approach to the matter. (And Imageshack seems to be screwing up, so you have to click on it. )

http://img301.echo.cx/img301/3678/pf5aj.jpg