Today I played around with my HVLP gun and latex paint that I had mixed up at my local Lowes store. I've read several post on spraying latex paint and since I don't have the proper equipment to spray PPG I figured I'd give latex a try. Below is a what I found worked for me.

Mixing the Paint
1) Using the spoon from some plastic ware that my wife had I spooned out 10 spoonfuls of latex paint into a 9oz plastic cup.
2) used my small scale and weight out 1 oz of water and poured that into the cup with paint.
3) added 1 spoonful of Flotrol paint conditioner and stirred everything up.
4) Then I poured the contents into my gravity feed HVLP gun.

Spraying
1) It took just a few adjustments on the gun to get the paint to spray like I liked it.
2) I proceeded to spray a light to medium coat on my part. I was careful not to spray too much and make it run. Again play with the gun adjustments.
3) I let that sit for about 3 or 4 minutes to allow the paint to settle out a bit before I used my Monokote heat gun to carefully apply a little heat to the painted section. I just wanted to heat the area until the sheen of the wet paint was gone.
4) I then sprayed another coat on the piece trying to get a little more coverage then before. I allowed some time for paint to settle out again before applying heat.
5) I repeated step 4 until I was satisfied with the coverage. One thing to note, do not apply too much heat once you have 3 or more coats down. It will cause the latex to crack and spraying too many coats will cause the orange peel effect.

I practiced on some sample pieces but plan to try this method out once more before I attempt to spray my plane. So far I am very pleased with the results and clean up was a breeze considering water is all you need. Plus latex has no fumes to worry about. When I go at this again I will take some pictures as I go long.

JR Gautreaux