I picked up an Artograph 1520 Spray Booth from the Hack Rack at Milwaukee Makerspace. Well, just the base of one, but the rest of the parts are fairly easy to DIY, so I did.
This spray booth lists for about $250 from various places, and if you use the 3 stage filter system you’ve got to get replacements at some point, and those aren’t cheap either. I don’t quite have a carbon-impregnated polyester filter for the third stage, and I still haven’t figured out the first stage pre-filter, but I grabbed one of my favorites, the super-cheap Ace Hardware 30 day furnace filter. The 20x25x1 is about $1.29 so even if I replace them pretty often, it’ll still be pretty darn cheap.
I use the larger Ace filters in my big spray painting booth, and with a lot of painting I can still go weeks before I replace one. Those are a bit larger, but they’re still under $2.00 each. I did need to cut the 20x25x1 down just a bit to fit in the 1520, but only in one dimension, so that’s not too bad. Scissors is all you need to cut it. And as for the cardboard hood (which you can see is recycled from a Pelican case) I ended up tracing the one we have at work. (Yup, same model, it’s a popular one. I didn’t even bother with the slots and tabs for the hood, I just used some gaff tape to secure the edges together.
I’ll probably use the booth as our spray glue booth, and the larger one is already doing great for spray paint, and I’d prefer not to mix those two mediums if possible.
So yeah, a bit of cardboard, gaff tape, a furnace filter, and a little bit of time, and I’ve got an excellent reconditioned Artograph 1520 Spray Booth.