Over 50 years ago, a few of the vacuum cleaner makers such as Kirby or Electrolux supplied a small spraygun as one of their accessories. Usually it was a small plastic spraygun with an attached jar for paint. When the spraygun was attached to the ‘blower’ end of the vacuum cleaner it could be used to spray thinned paints (albeit, very thinned paints). Although the system lacked power and sophistication - this was the beginning of HVLP. These inexpensive sprayguns demonstrated that high pressure was really not necessary to spray paint. So Low pressure could work in exactly the same way, with one major difference - the lower velocity (pressure and speed) of the air resulted in less overspray and less wasted paint.

The true HVLP originators such as Sicmo (Monaco) and Apollo (England) built the first professionally used low pressure sprayguns. Until the late 1980’s all other HVLP sprayguns copied these early guns in every respect. In fact, the Sicmo spraygun (under different names) is still in use today with no significant changes in decades except that Sicmo (the company) is gone and all these copies are made in Taiwan or mainland China.

Apollo Sprayers started in England in 1966 and then in 1981, John Darroch, became the first HVLP spray equipment manufacturer in North America. Apollo was instrumental in demonstrating to SCAQMD, (South Coast Air Quality Management District - California) that HVLP greatly decreased overspray and waste.

Sicmo was also the first maker of a true HVLP conversion spraygun - now commonly called HVLP compressor guns.

Fuji Spray was also one of the original HVLP makers having started manufacturing HVLP turbine systems back over 20 years ago in 1986.

A few HVLP makers have disappeared over the years. Some of these names include Sprayfine, Amspray, Capspray, Titan, Croix and even Sicmo. Amspray, Capspray and Titan are now associated with Wagner. Croix is a part of Graco.