The kind of day I like for spraying

[Tom King]

It has about 3 oz. of low VOC water borne varnish in it, so not like it's really toxic.  There is no need to leave that much in the rig, but I wanted to leave enough to be able to show the cleaning process clearly.   Yesterday, I just poured it on a pile of leaves that I need to move anyway.  When I'm spraying something by the shop, I just spray it out on the grass, and it disappears at the next grass cutting.  That sort of thing seems to be the biggest worry for most people about airless.

When I have worked in a city, I do the cleaning in a sink, and it just gets washed down a sink.

Solvent based stuff is a lot more trouble, but water borne is no issue for me.

[Chestnut]

When i cleaned the airless rig I had there was a hookup to go strait to a garden hose. I attached the hose to the ring and flushed it by spraying the diluted paint into the yard.

@CoopIn the grand scheme of things the VOC in the paint is what's considered harmful. Once it dries it's essentially the base components which aren't considered hazardous waste and can go to a regular landfill. If your concerned about it capture the rinse and dry it up with sawdust and then stick it in the trash. If the base components of paint were hazardous to human health they wouldn't be allowed in homes eg. lead based paint.

The reason it's not allowed in the trash wet is because volatile organic chemicals are well volatile and garbage truck fires are a serious thing as are landfill fires. Those 2 types are fires and difficult to extinguish and incredibly dangerous.

For sewer disposal i can't technically advocate disposal there but it's not likely to harm much. The VOCs from paint are less harmful than what is naturally occurring in sewers, and most if not all waste water treatment plans are capable of dealing with it due to commercial and industrial waste being worse. A lot of sewer systems are starting to use digesters (aka furnaces) that extract the energy in organics from waste water and produce electricity and heat to heat buildings and sell electricity. The solids that make the paint would just get settled out of the water. It's a pretty simple process if you'd like more detail there are a videos that explain a high level of it that i could send you.

[Coop]

I guess I asked to justify what I have been doing for years with water borne. Now, my used mineral spirits and other such, go to our cities waste site to be disposed of by them. 

[Tom King]

Finally finished.   The varnish was still a wee bit tender this morning, but they can finish curing in place.  This was one job I'm glad is behind me.

 

[pkinneb]

Nice!!

[Coop]

Those look darn good! 

[wtnhighlander]

Better than new, IMO!

[Tom King]

Thanks guys.  They really do look better in person than I can catch in a photo. 

That waterborne marine varnish really is an amazing advance over the old solvent based marine and spar varnish.  Those old Marine and Spar varnishes needed to be sanded between coats, and each coat left to dry until the next day or longer.  This Halcyon I was able to put 6 coats on in one day, and after the base coats were sanded, no more sanding was needed.

[JohnG]

Looks great!

[leeeveretI]

I like the way it looks. Anyway, interesting info here

[Tom King]

A couple of months past two years from when I started this thread:  I was over there with new renters coming in and remembered to take this picture.  At first I thought the doors had started to deteriorate some, but it was just dirt on the little horizontal surfaces near the bottom.  They look like I just sprayed them.  I'm very pleased with the products I used for this finish.

Looking at the earlier pictures, if anything the wood color underneath has evened out some, but I have no idea why.  I do remember there being more of a variation than they have now.

Looking back through this thread I see that I said we were hoping to rent it in the Summer of that year, 2022.  There ended up being too much stuff to fix, and first renters weren't in until Christmas of that year.  Summer of 2023 could be considered a success, and 2024 is going much better than we ever expected, being booked solid from the first part of March.  I still have one more fiberglass bathtub to replace in it, but it might be Winter after next before I get to that.