Design and Build of a Paintbrush Washer

Cleaning a paintbrush is a time-consuming and wasteful process. This project aims to design and build a paintbrush washer that cleans a paintbrush in under three minutes while retaining the cleaning medium for future use. The prototype will clean 1 to 3-inch-wide paintbrushes saturated with either water-based or oil-based paints. The design will feature nozzles that spray the cleaning medium through the bristles while the linkage moves the nozzles across the width of the paintbrush. The prototype accomplishes this with the use of a pump, motor-driven linkage, and pipe/nozzle system. The required nozzle exit velocity was found experimentally, and a pump was selected based on the loss in the piping system and the desired flow rate. Experiments were conducted to verify these design choices. These experiments demonstrated that the paintbrush washer cleans a paintbrush in under three minutes.