- Poor lighting conditions can lead to costly mistakes in both manual and automatic paint application. There are many factors that contribute to proper lighting such as brightness, color and placement of bulbs .Typically, most spray booths use either fluorescent or LED bulbs rated at a specific industry standard of quality. Proper lighting must also follow NFPA 70 electrical codes to ensure operational safety. Improper lighting choices can lead to more expensive operational costs
Achieving a high-quality spray finish on your manufactured parts requires several spray paint booth components to seamlessly work together, such as fans for air flow filtration working in tandem with proper paint application equipment.
While many facility managers and operators do a good job of maintaining these necessary parts of their spray booth system, it’s easy to overlook another important requirement for high-quality finishes: the presence of proper lighting.
Unfortunately, overlooking the importance of proper lighting can be problem some and expensive for manufacturers and customers. In industries such as aerospace, the poor quality of initial applications cannot be easily fixed due to meticulous weight restrictions. Therefore, it is critical for manufacturers to have the proper lighting in their spray booths in order to achieve the optimal finish during the first application.In this article, we will examine how spray booth lighting impacts the following three factors: Finish Quality / Operational Safety / Operational Costs.
Finish Quality
Spray booth lighting can have a decisive impact on the final finish quality of an application, especially if the finish is manually applied by your paint operators. In manual applications, operators need to properly see in order to direct the spray pattern towards the areas that require more coating. Without proper lighting, your operators are more likely to make costly mistakes that require more material costs and hours of service to fix.
Even in automated operations, proper lighting is needed to inspect the final finish quality. But choosing the right lighting for each finishing application isn’t as simple as buying the brightest lights you can find, it takes a delicate understanding of both lighting qualities and lighting options as well.
Light Qualities
Brightness and color can affect how the final finish looks on a particular manufactured part. Light brightness is often measured in units called ‘foot-candles’. In many industries, the standard is 100-150 foot candles at a 3-foot height. This level of illumination allows the color and finish to be properly graded and inspected.
The color also impacts how the final finish looks. Full-spectrum light can be a good choice, but manufacturers should also note the Color Rendering Index (or CRI number). Rated on a scale of 0-100, lighting with a higher CRI is less likely to have color shift or distortion, with a rating of 85 or higher being desired.