Landry Posted March 17 Report Share Posted March 17 For some reason my fluid beds I made are not working properly. The air seems to be going up the inside walls of the cup. I used photocopy paper as my filter/bottom of paint area - is there another type of more porous paper I could try? Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kasilofchrisn Posted March 17 Report Share Posted March 17 There are tons of different materials to use as fluid bed membranes. Tyvek from the post office envelope works well for lots of paints. Just make sure you have the correct side up. Brown paper bag material of different thicknesses can work. Different weights of copy paper can work. Vacuum cleaner bag material can work. Again just make sure you have the correct side facing up. I find with a lot of my paints I have to stir them up first is sometimes they will settle and cake up a little bit. And some of them just never want to flow properly due to the heavy pigments in them. I actually built a vibratory fluid bed base for my problem paints and it does help quite a bit with some of them. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Catignani Posted March 17 Report Share Posted March 17 11 hours ago, Kasilofchrisn said: I actually built a vibratory fluid bed base for my problem paints and it does help quite a bit with some of them. The key word here is "vibratory". Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
azsouth Posted March 17 Report Share Posted March 17 There are a lot of different reasons why fluid beds don't work. Here are a couple. 1. Moisture in the powder. 2. Powder is compacted, just use something to stir it and add air. 3. Lack of air flow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SlowFISH Posted March 22 Report Share Posted March 22 On 3/17/2022 at 10:06 AM, azsouth said: There are a lot of different reasons why fluid beds don't work. Here are a couple. 1. Moisture in the powder. 2. Powder is compacted, just use something to stir it and add air. 3. Lack of air flow. azsouth just gave a bunch to watch... and are usually the main culprits. If you are using fresh, new powder and still having issues.... then yes you'd have to start messing with your fluidbed. I use coffee filters for my "membrane" - seems to work well and is cheap as can be - you can double up if necessary to get the right amount of penetration - or even perforate the second (outer) layer in areas you'd want to "focus" the air a little more. I recently had exact same issues... first was old powder - it was "fluffy" to my eye, but when I got a fresh bag of it I noticed that it what I had was more sugar grain like instead of talcum powder like... made a huge difference. I also added "vibration" to my little 1 cup setup. Bought some vibrating motors off amazon for an X-Box controller. connected (2 AA) batteries and mounted the motor. Seems to shake the powder just enough to help keep it flowing. I'd probably get a bigger motor if I did it again to really shake it good, but it definitely helps to vibrate. From what I can tell it doesn't allow the "tunnels/chimneys" of air to form - as once hey do the shake/vibration collapses it. J. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
