New To Spray

Using new materials or methods of work is always an exciting yet scary time for trades. You spend years working in one way, honing those skills and then something comes along which makes you question what you did before. Sometimes the old ways are still the best way of working but more often than not, the new ways enhance and improve your skillset.

Spraying isn't something new to my trade, it's been around for years. I did it at college applying the old portaflek, the same finish that was prevalent in a lot of schools and hospitals back then. Now spraying is becoming more widespread over here amongst decorators. Over in America they've used this way a lot more than we do, thanks to youtube and social media we get to see different ways of working and now we are embracing them. 18 months ago I brought a Graco Ultra handheld sprayer, used it sporadically since but if I'm honest I couldn't grasp it right. I made too much of a mess, the clean up often took longer than the set up and I ended up using brush and roller again. Last weekend though I had commercial job to do. This one I knew I had to use a spray machine so I purchased a second hand Q-Tech PO19, basically a entry level airless sprayer, to do the job. Once the initial fear and teething problems were out of the way and we got into a system of working my mind was blown. Something that would have taken 4 days by brush and roller was completed in 2 days and with a flawless finish i would never had got by roller.

This has opened my eyes to the possibility I should be using this system on my domestic jobs more often. It was while I was on this job I booked myself on to a spray course with Dulux Academy, thought if I've invested the money now I should invest the time to learn the correct way to use the machines. So thats something thats happening in the next few weeks and I'm very excited about it. Also I have been part of Dulux Select for 4 years now and I haven't utilised the opportunity to further my skillset enough with the amount of courses that are available to me, so this is another reason to take the course. I'll post later how it went, if its as enjoyable as the first one I went on 3 years ago then I'm in for a treat.