Painting base coat and clear coat. 

Water flows at about 17 seconds with a Zahn 2 cup. If you are getting 18-21 seconds, your material will need a 1.0mm or 1.3/1.5mm tip. Opening the fluid mix will get you more gloss saturation, but the size of the 0.8mm orifice is too small for the material flow, and this will choke the fluid out causing it to be more dry, then you'll end up compensating by increasing the fluid mix out. Try the larger needle and tip and reduce the fluid turns out, you'll have more lean/rich adjustment available to the air ratio. The higher psi machine will get you more air, but it's only forcing material out faster because it's still pressuring the cup but with more psi. The air/material balance will easily be achieved by going up in tip size. Remember this, you want to flow the material out - and not choke it out of the tip, go up a tip size to have easier flowing material. The "wild psi" machine will allow you to move faster with the spraying pass, but you'll still have to wait for the saturation to occur at the surface level. Gloss is achieved from full saturation, if you need more saturation - you're needing more fluid on the surface, bump up a tip size and see if it helps.

Sometimes the cured finish will tighten after it shrinks down, this is called tightening, pinching out. Do some test panels with different number of coats, or different brands of clear. And, as long as there is enough mils paint thickness, the panel can be lightly sanded and polished out.

Hey Jake i also forgot to ask. When testing on the wall, do you also look for the gloss/wetness when spraying basecoat? Or does that only apply when testing prior to spraying clearcoat? I tried spraying some 3.5 voc basecoat (speedokote) with their zero voc slow reducer and noticed the paint dried a bit quick and texture slight bit of texture even though I sprayed it on the wet/glossy side. I'm wondering if the solvents in the low voc paint get dried out by the hvlp turbine?

When adjusting fluid mix for the base coat, I'm looking for two important things - gloss saturation and "hiding". Gloss saturation shows us the mix is wet enough, and "hiding" shows us how well the base coat will cover with each spray pass. Also important is to avoid over wetting the base coat - saturate but do not flood the panel. Check the temp range of the reducer you are using and count the number of coats you are applying color. Some base coats "texture out" to a certain look when dry, but after you apply the clear coat, how does it look? Try experimenting with using the same reducer mix during a colder temp spray day or time, and see if the drying time and texture appear better or worse.