Realized my paint booth lights were the problem, not my spraying

Last week I was fighting a runny clear coat on a 2018 F-150 hood at my shop in Tulsa. I blamed my gun settings for 2 days, kept adjusting pressure and fluid, still garbage finish. Then I noticed the booth's fluorescent tubes were flickering and casting shadows right where the runs kept showing up. Swapped in 6 LED strips, total cost $180, and the SAME settings laid down perfectly smooth. Has anyone else chased a spray issue that turned out to be a lighting problem in the booth?

2 comments

2 Comments

sullivan.quinn6h agoTop Commenter

Did you check the color of the light too before you swapped them? I had the exact same thing happen with a silver metallic on a Chevy Silverado, kept getting tiger stripes that would only show up on the driver side. Turned out one of my fluorescents was dying and putting out a weird yellow tint that made the flake look patchy. After I put in new LEDs, the same clear laid down flat, no runs, no stripes. It's crazy how much your eyes lie to you when the light is garbage.

kimdixon4h ago

Gotta push back on this one a little. Lights can matter, sure, but blaming them for a runny clear coat feels like the easy way out. Runs come from too much material on the panel, period. The lighting might have made the runs harder to see while you were laying it down, but it didn't cause the gun to spit out extra clear. If your pressure and fluid settings were truly dialed in, you'd have felt the difference in the spray pattern or the tack time, not just seen it after the fact. I've sprayed in booths with flickering tubes and straight up dark corners for years, and the finish still came out right because I adjusted to what the gun was telling me, not what my eyes thought they saw. Take this with a grain of salt, but I'd bet if you went back to those old settings with the LEDs, you'd still get some runs if the thickness wasn't right to begin with.