What Causes Airless Paint Sprayer Tails?

What Causes Airless Paint Sprayer Tails?

Airless Paint Sprayer tails occur because the paint is not being evenly atomized by the fluid being forced through your airless paint sprayers fluid tip.  There are a few different solutions to the problem of airless paint sprayer tails.

 

X-6H / X-3H Airless Paint Sprayer with High Cart

Potential Fixes for Airless Paint Sprayer Tails

1. Increase the pressure on your airless paint sprayer – The most common cause of tails on an airless paint sprayer’s pattern is that the pressure is not turned up high enough to provide adequate even atomization of your coating throughout the pattern. The first thing to try is always to increase the pressure on your airless paint sprayer so as to make sure the fluid will be totally atomized onto the surface.  There’re currently two kinds of spray tips in the market, the traditional spray tip need minimum 100bar / 1450psi as the spraying pressure and make sure the equal atomization, while the newly developed fine finish spray tips only need 60 – 70bar (870 – 1000psi) pressure for equal atomization.
2. Thin Your Paint – If increasing the pressure on the airless paint sprayer doesn’t work, you can try to add a little bit of an appropriate thinner to your paint. By using thinner paint less pressure will result in a greater break up of the coating which should help to reduce issues with tails. (for the water based paint, you can dilute the paint with 10% water, no more than 15%.  and for the oil based paint, you may need to dilute with thinner)
3. Clean your airless paint spray tip-if you have not recently cleaned the airless tip or the airless sprayer has been in storage for a while, you want to use an appropriate thinner to clean off the tip. or you can use a brush (not soft, not hard, medium ) to clean it. If thinner does not remove any buildup on the tip, you may need to replace the tip. This is because any obstruction on your airless paint spray gun tip, will result in issues in your spray pattern.
4. Check the distance at which you are spraying from the surface product– For airless Paint sprayers the recommended distance is usually 12 – 14 inches.  If you spray too close you can get fingers, if you move too slow you can get issues with puddling and fingers as well. So you need flow the rules of the spraying technic which is writen in the operation manual. please read the manual before start spraying.
5. Give the tip time to break in – A tip can sometimes need a bit of time to break in and spray appropriately if you have tried a variety of the other suggestions spraying on a surface that requires a less fine finish may be a good idea to see if the tip needs to be used a while. if the problem keeps happening after several minutes, then you have to find other way or replace a new one.
6. Consider a Fine Finish Airless Tip – As we explained above, there’s another type of lower pressure atoming spray tip.  A Fine finish airless tip brings the material through two restrictions causing an additional level of atomization. The downside to a fine finish tip is that they may not last as long as a traditional airless paint sprayer tip. If your pump couldn’t generate such high pressure based on this spray nozzle tip size, then change to the Fine Finish spray tip would get better finish.
7. Consider Air Assist Airless – If you routinely need finer atomization for your application, maybe because it is for wood finishing or an application that requires higher quality finishes, you may want to consider an air assist airless as the assist air will remove the fingers in your spray pattern. The air assis airless sprayer just like our X6AA pump it’s good for cabinet / window / door wood spraying, and also you can use it for wall coating, because it has better finishing than traditional airless spray.
8. Use high quality paints – Often times higher quality paints will have less chance of plugging your airless tip which will help reduce problems with tails. and the life of the coating will last longer of course.
9. Check your airless paint sprayers Stroke – An airless paint sprayer should have a crisp even stroke if it is not consistent throughout its stroke, your packings or balls and seats may be worn causing issues with consistent pressure. Without consistent pressure you could experience tails. It’s easy to check if any of your piston rod / packings / ball / or ball seat get damage / worn out, or just stuck with some dirties, Just turn on the machine, set it to the maximum pressure, and let the machine work to highest pressure and stop, and keep it for 1 minute to see if the pressure will go down or not.  If the pressure goes down without spraying out, that means somewhere is worn or get dirties , it couldn’t generate high pressure inside. so you need to check one by one, disassemble the pump and clean all the ball / ball seat.

DP-6337iB Electric Airless Sprayer Piston Pump 7.0L

By considering these 9 tips you should be able to resolve the issue with your airless paint sprayer giving you tails.  By eliminating tails you can achieve better finishes.