DIY Paint Stand?

[PFDarkside]

I’ve finally taken the plunge and have ordered a paint kit for my unfinished Strat body from the sale a while ago. (I’ve done a bit of spray painting with other items, have proper PPE and know the value of good prep work as well as steps to achieve a good finish)

Any tips for building a makeshift stand to paint a guitar? Thinking black pipe, some fittings, a dowel and a base of some sort?

 

[ragamuffin]

I made one pretty similar to this

 

[PFDarkside]

I made one pretty similar to this

Thanks! Do you recall about how much it cost?

 

[ragamuffin]

Thanks! Do you recall about how much it cost?

It's been a while, but I know it wasn't a lot. PVC is pretty cheap.

Mine does not go into the table like his: I stuck the pvc shaft into a galvanized floor flange which is bolted to a square piece of wood a little bigger than then one in the video.

Weighing it down/keeping it stable was a bit hard though, I settled on using one of those half sized cement blocks 8x8x8? around the base and filled the hole in the block with metal fishing weights. Works great for most bodies, but an extra heavy body or bass body might be sketchy on it.

 

[NedRyerson]

I tried the PVC path for a while but as Raga experienced, strength & stability just aren't there with PVC. You get what you pay for,.

I use the StewMac helping hand that I clamp into a spare bench vise that I mounted onto a pair of 2x4s. While I'd love the stand-alone spinning rig that Fender shows off in their IG videos, this is as close as I can get. I place the vise rig onto a folding workbench and set that up inside a paint tent. I can spin it horizontally to a degree with the vise, and the StewMac arm lets me rotate the body on its Y axis.

While it's popular to bag on SM products, it's worked for me for, at this point, enough bodies where I've lost track of how many I've done.

 

[TimesNewRoman]

Here is another take made from scraps :


The base is an outdoor umbrella stand. The horizontal wood is an axe handle friction fitted into PVC sized to turn smoothly in the black "T". It rotates freely in both plains but is totally stable. One nice thing about something like this is that you can spray with the can vertical and immediately after a coat flip the piece horizontal to discourage runs. I have seen some small runs level out if you can get it horizontal fast enough.