Just rolled past 100,000 hours behind a spray gun...

I was looking at my logbook yesterday and did the math, figured out I've got around 100,000 hours of spray time under my belt. That's like 11 years of straight painting if you never slept... kinda hit me weird how much time I've actually spent in a booth. Anyone else ever stop and count up their hours in a specific part of the trade?

3 comments

3 Comments

abbyp612d ago

Wait hold on, I gotta push back a bit here. 100,000 hours is a ton of time no doubt, but counting it that way kinda misses the point for me. Spraying isn't just about pulling a trigger for 11 years straight, it's about learning how to read a surface, how the paint lays down different when it's hot or cold, how to fix a run without making it worse. If you boiled it down to just hours in the booth you'd be ignoring all the time spent mixing, cleaning guns, sanding between coats, and figuring out why something fisheyed. I've met guys with 50,000 hours who still screw up basic stuff because they never paid attention to the details. Hours don't measure skill, they just measure time. It's way more about what you actually learned in those hours that makes you good.

the_oliver2d ago

Do you really think showing up counts for nothing though?

wader712d ago

Wait, hold on, you're telling me there are guys out there with 50,000 hours who still mess up basic stuff? That blows my mind. I always figured by that point you'd have it all dialed in, like muscle memory takes over no matter what. But I guess if you're just going through the motions for years without actually paying attention, you can stay mediocre forever. That's a really good point about reading surfaces and the temperature thing - I've seen guys in my line of work who've been doing it forever but still can't figure out why something's going wrong because they never learned the why behind the what. Hours just show you showed up, not that you learned anything. Being good takes more than just showing up.