Skip to content
ARMORTHANE PROTECTING YOUR WORLD

PROTECTING YOUR WORLD

ARMORTHANE PROTECTING YOUR WORLD

Spray-On Bedliner
Equipment Cost:
2026 Buyer's Guide

Real numbers for real, working packages low-pressure and high-pressure — plus the line item that derails more first-time buyers than the machine price ever does.
Low-Pressure Package

$25,000

ArmorLine LP proportioner, hose, gun, first material, prep & safety gear, training, certification.
High-Pressure System

~$50,000

PMC or Graco proportioner, heated hose, gun, material, training. Varies with output and electrical spec.
Franchise Fee

$0

No franchise fee. No royalty. No percentage of your gross. Ever.

Every week I get some version of the same phone call. Guy’s got a body shop, or a truck accessory store, or twelve acres and a pole barn and a plan. He’s watched enough spray videos to know he wants in. And then he asks the question nobody on the internet will answer straight:

"What's this actually going to cost me?"

Fair question. Annoyingly hard to find a real answer to, because most of the industry would rather get you on the phone before they say a number. So let’s just put the numbers on the table. A complete low-pressure bedliner setup from us runs about $25,000. A high-pressure system lands closer to $50,000 depending on how you spec it. Those are real figures for real, working packages — not a machine sitting on a pallet with no hose, no gun, and no material.

But the number is the easy part. What actually matters is which one of those two roads you belong on, and there are shops running $50,000 rigs that had no business buying them, and guys clearing six figures a year on equipment that cost half that.

Here’s how to tell which one you are.

Graco Reactor 3 high-pressure proportioner: Spray with confidence.

Two completely different
machines, and the reason has
nothing to do with price

Two completely different
machines, and the reason
has nothing to do
with price

People assume low pressure is the budget version of high pressure. Same thing, less money, worse results.

That’s wrong, and understanding why it’s wrong is the single most useful thing in this whole article.

Both systems are plural-component. Two drums — an A side and a B side — pumped separately, brought together, mixed, sprayed. The difference is how the mixing happens, and that one mechanical detail cascades into everything else: the chemistry you can spray, the cure speed, the power you need at the panel, the skill floor, and how badly a mistake hurts.

High-pressure impingement mixing diagram showing isocyanate and amine resin colliding in a mix chamber at 2,000 to 3,000 PSI

2,000–3,000 PSI

Heated 150–160°F · Gel time 2–10 seconds

Low-pressure static mix bedliner system diagram showing isocyanate and polyol resin flowing through a helical mixing element

A FEW HUNDRED PSI

Ambient · Working time in minutes, not seconds

VS

Why the chemistry dictates the machine: polyurea’s amine–isocyanate reaction is diffusion-limited and gels in seconds, so it can only be mixed by two streams colliding at high velocity. Slow the chemistry to polyurethane and a static element has time to do the same job at a fraction of the pressure.

High-pressure equipment mixes by impingement. The two streams get pushed to somewhere around 2,000–3,000 psi and slammed into each other inside a mix chamber the size of a pencil eraser. The collision itself is the mixer. There’s no paddle, no static element, no premix — just two jets of material colliding hard enough to turn turbulent and homogenize in a few milliseconds. Meanwhile the material’s been heated to roughly 150–160°F on its way through the hose, which drops viscosity and makes that collision far more violent than it would be at room temperature.

Now here’s why that matters chemically. Polyurea cures by reacting an isocyanate with an amine. That reaction is fast — essentially diffusion-limited, meaning the two molecules react about as quickly as they can physically find each other. Gel time is measured in seconds. Two, maybe six, sometimes ten. You’re tack-free before you finish walking around the truck.

You cannot mix that by hand. You cannot mix it in a bucket. There is no world in which a stir stick keeps up with a reaction that fast. Impingement mixing exists because the chemistry demanded it.

Low-pressure equipment goes the other direction. It runs at a few hundred psi, mixes through a static mixer or at the gun with far less turbulent energy, and to make that work the chemistry has to slow down. So low-pressure bedliner material isn’t polyurea — it’s polyurethane. Isocyanate plus a polyol resin instead of an amine, which forms urethane linkages rather than urea linkages, and reacts on a scale of minutes instead of seconds.

Our STS-200 is the one most bedliner shops end up on. Two-to-one ratio, 100% solids, no mercury catalyst, no VOCs, no TDI. It sprays soft and flexible compared to most polyurethanes on the market, with the tear strength and tensile modulus you want under a load of firewood or a dropped transmission.

  • The $25,000 Road

What low pressure actually gets
you — and what it costs

The ArmorLine LP series is what we build the $25,000 package around. Two configurations:


  • Series 4111 — 1:1 mix ratio
  • Series 4121 — 2:1 mix ratio (this is the one that sprays STS-200)

Both push up to 0.75 gallons per minute standard. There’s a high-volume pump option that takes you to 1.25 gpm if you’re doing bigger work. Line sets run out to 150 feet, which is plenty for a two-bay shop and enough to walk out to a trailer in the lot. It’ll pull from 5-gallon pails or 55-gallon drums, and the color change is genuinely quick — that “quick change color” feature sounds like brochure filler until you’re doing a bright red Ram on Tuesday and a fleet of black F-250s on Wednesday.

Material flow and texture adjust at the gun. That’s the part guys underestimate. On a high-pressure rig, texture is a function of pressure, temperature, tip selection and your hand speed, and dialing it in is a genuine skill. On the LP, you’re turning a knob on the gun until the sample panel looks right.

  • Complete Turnkey Package

Everything in the box

$25,000

Complete — no franchise fee

  • Proportioner — ArmorLine LP 4111 or 4121, complete
  • Line set — up to 150 ft, hoses and fittings
  • Spray gun — EZ gun with remote operation, flow and texture control at the trigger
  • First material — starting set of chemical, enough to build a portfolio and take real jobs
  • Prep & safety gear — respirator, suits, gloves, tape, masking, prep supplies
  • Training — virtual e-training or on-site with our applicators
  • Certification — ArmorThane applicator certification
  • Support — 24/7 tech line. Not a ticket system, a phone number

No franchise fee. No royalty. No territory restriction. We’ll come back to that, because it’s a bigger deal than most people realize when they’re comparing quotes.

The honest limitations: throughput and cure time. A high-pressure liner is walk-on in minutes. Low-pressure polyurethane needs longer before you hand the keys back — you’re generally looking at same-day, not same-hour. If your business plan is fourteen beds a day, low pressure will bottleneck you. If it’s two to five, which is what most independent shops actually do, you’ll never feel the ceiling.

Complete low-pressure spray-on bedliner equipment package including mobile cart proportioner, spray gun, and training certification
  • The $50,000 Road

High pressure: PMC, Graco, and
what the extra $25,000 buys

High pressure: PMC, Graco,
and what the extra
$25,000 buys

Once you’re past roughly six or seven beds a day, or you want to sell more than bedliners, the math flips.

We run PMC proportioners on the ArmorLine HP side. Here’s the actual lineup, with real numbers:

MODEL OUTPUT NOTES
PMC PHX-2 1.7 gal/min Entry-level hydraulic. High value, modest output.
PMC PHX-25 — Compact classic two-heater. Small to medium work.
PMC PHX-40 2.8 gal/min The workhorse. Dual heaters at 15, 18 or 21 kW. 3,500 psi max, hose to 410 ft, 190°F max fluid, 555 lb dry.
PMC PHX-55 3.25 gal/min Dual 21 kW heaters, rugged build, biggest jobs.
PMC PKX-25 — Air-driven pumps. Lowest startup cost in the HP family — built for truck accessory and body shops.

That last one deserves a flag. The PKX-25 is pneumatic rather than hydraulic, and it exists more or less specifically for truck accessory and body shops. Lower entry cost, simpler to maintain, and if you already have a serious compressor for your paint booth you’re partway there. A lot of guys who think they have to choose between “cheap low pressure” and “expensive high pressure” have never had the PKX-25 explained to them.

The PHX-40 is the one most people land on. 2.8 gal/min, 3,500 psi max, hose runs to 410 feet, max fluid temp 190°F, and it weighs 555 pounds dry so plan your floor space accordingly.

High-pressure PMC and Graco commercial bedliner equipment package with heated hoses, transfer pumps, and spray gun

What about Graco?

Graco’s Reactor line is the other major name, and I’ll be straight with you — it’s good equipment. The Reactor 2 E-XP2 tops out at 3,500 psi and 2 gal/min, 15 kW, 310 feet of heated hose, 190°F max fluid temperature. Their Fusion AP gun is a genuinely nice piece of hardware: 2.6 pounds, air-blast tip cleaning, hand-tight front cap so you can swap a mix chamber without pulling out a wrench. If you’re already in a Graco shop and your parts guy is two miles away, there’s a real argument for staying in that ecosystem.

SPEC PMC PHX-40 GRACO REACTOR 2 E-XP2 ARMORLINE LP 4121
Max output 2.8 gal/min 2.0 gal/min 0.75 gal/min (1.25 w/ HV pump)
Max pressure 3,500 psi 3,500 psi Low pressure
Max hose length 410 ft 310 ft 150 ft
Max fluid temp 190°F 190°F Ambient
Electrical draw 142 A @ 1-ph 230V
82 A @ 3-ph 		100 A @ 1-ph 230V
62 A @ 3-ph 		Standard shop service
Chemistry Polyurea Polyurea Polyurethane (STS-200)

Where we differ is what happens after the sale. Graco makes machines. We formulate the chemistry, build the packages, train the operator, and answer the phone at 9 p.m. when a liner is fish-eyeing and you can’t figure out why. Different business, not a better machine.

Electrical breaker panel diagram displaying voltage and 3-phase power service requirements for bedliner spray machines

  • High-Pressure Package

Everything in the box

~$50,000

Configuration moves this number

  • Proportioner — PMC PHX series, sized to your volume
  • Heated hose — up to 310–410 ft depending on model
  • Spray gun — air-purge or mechanical purge, plus spare mix chambers and tips
  • Transformer / electrical — frequently required. See below, this is the one that bites people
  • First material — polyurea: ArmorLiner or the HighLine formulation that fits your work
  • Prep, safety, training, certification — same as the LP package, scaled up

A PHX-2 with a short hose set is a different animal from a PHX-55 with 400 feet of heated line, and I’d rather quote you honestly than pretend one number fits.

  • Read This Before You Buy Anything

The line item that kills more deals
than the machine price

The line item that kills
more deals than the
machine price

Power.

Look at the PHX-40 amperage draw again. With the 21 kW heater package you need 142 amps at single-phase 230V, or 82 amps on three-phase. The Graco E-XP2 wants 100 amps single-phase.
Most shop buildings do not have that. A lot of them have a 100-amp service for the whole building — lights, compressor, lift, everything. So you’re either calling an electrician for a service upgrade, or buying a transformer, or running a generator, and any of those is a four-figure line item nobody put in the original budget.

I’ve watched this derail more first-time buyers than any other single factor. Somebody scrapes together the machine money, the machine shows up, and then they find out the building can’t feed it.

  • Go look at your electrical panel. Right now.
The low-pressure system sidesteps this almost entirely. That’s not a small footnote — for a guy converting a bay in an existing building, it can be the whole decision.
Industrial spray booth exhaust ventilation system and air filtration setup for spray-on polyurea application
  • The $50,000 Road

The rest of the list

Air

High-pressure rigs want clean, dry, plentiful air — and I mean dry. Water vapor riding down your air line finds the isocyanate side and reacts with it, and what you get back is foaming, blisters, and a liner that lets go of the substrate six months later. Refrigerated dryer at minimum. Desiccant downstream of that if you’re serious.

Surface Prep

Ninety percent of the job, and I will absolutely die on this hill. DA sander, abrasives, degreaser, tack rags — plus the discipline to actually use all four when you’re behind on a Friday. Scuff a factory clearcoat halfheartedly and it’ll peel inside a season. Then the customer tells ten people.

Masking

More than you think. Way more. Budget for it as a real consumable line, not an afterthought — a clean edge is most of what a customer is actually paying you for.

Ventilation

Isocyanates require it. This is a safety issue, not a comfort one, and it’s not somewhere to improvise.

Shop Space

A truck bed plus room to walk around it plus the machine plus drum storage. Call it a 24×30 bay minimum to work comfortably.

Warm Drum
Storage

Material viscosity climbs as temperature drops. Cold drums spray badly. If your building drops below 60°F in January, you need a plan before January.
Realistically, tack $3,000 to $8,000 onto either package for the shop side if you’re starting from a bare building. Less if you’ve already got a compressor, ventilation and prep gear installed — sometimes nothing at all. Which is precisely why body shops convert into bedliner shops so easily.
  • Run The Numbers Yourself

Now do the franchise math

Here’s where it gets genuinely interesting. Say you build a shop doing $300,000 a year — a realistic number for an established independent bedliner operation, not a fantasy.

LINE-X Franchise

$153,500

Five-year cost, fees alone

Franchise fee $50,000
Royalty on gross 5.4%
Ad fund on gross 1.5%
Year one total $70,700
Every year after $20,700
Liquid capital required $50,000
Net worth required $150,000
Published total investment range: $25,000 to $561,320. Rhino Linings runs a comparable model.

ArmorThane Dealer

$0

Five-year cost, fees alone
Franchise fee None
Royalty on gross None
Ad fund on gross None
Year one total $0
Every year after $0
Liquid capital required None set
Net worth required None set

You buy equipment. You buy material. That’s the whole arrangement.

That $153,500 buys you a brand name and a territory. It doesn’t buy you one drum of material, one hose, or one hour of machine time.
We’ve been at this 35-plus years without a franchise agreement, because Garry built the company on the idea that you shouldn’t have to rent your own business back from somebody.
You do give something up. You don’t get a national brand pulling walk-ins. You have to market yourself, and some guys genuinely aren’t built for that — if you want a system that hands you leads and you’re happy paying 7% of everything forever, a franchise is a legitimate choice and I won’t pretend otherwise.
But if you already know how to get customers? The independent model isn’t close.
Financial comparison chart showing $153,500 traditional bedliner franchise fees compared to $0 ArmorThane dealership model
  • Four Questions

So which one do you buy?

Put the spec sheets down. Four honest answers will sort this faster than any comparison chart I could build you.

How many beds a day,
realistically, in month six?

Under five, low pressure carries you fine. Six to twelve is where high pressure begins paying for itself in recovered cure time — every hour a bed sits curing is an hour that bay earns nothing. Past twelve? You already know, and you’re not reading buyer’s guides.

What does your electrical
panel say?

Go look. Right now. If you’ve got 100-amp service and no appetite for an upgrade, low pressure isn’t a compromise — it’s the only sane answer.

Are bedliners the whole
business, or the entry point?

This one gets overlooked. If you also want to spray secondary containment, flooring, foundation waterproofing, RV roofs, industrial tanks — high pressure and polyurea open all of it. The truck bed becomes your least profitable line of work. Some of our best dealers started with pickups and now spend most of their time on containment berms and warehouse floors because it pays two and three times better per hour.

How much can you actually
afford to lose right now?

Twenty-five thousand is recoverable. Fifty thousand plus an electrical upgrade plus a lease, when you’ve never sprayed a liner in your life, is a different kind of risk. There’s no shame in starting at $25K, proving you like the work and can sell it, and stepping up in eighteen months. That path has produced more successful applicators than the other one.
  • Straight Answers

Bedliner equipment FAQ

A complete low-pressure package runs about $25,000, including the proportioner, hose, gun, first set of material, prep and safety gear, and training. High-pressure systems built around PMC or Graco proportioners land near $50,000, varying with output, hose length and electrical configuration. Machine-only prices you see quoted elsewhere leave out hose, gun, material and training — which is most of what you actually need.

High-pressure systems mix by impingement at 2,000–3,000 psi with heated material, which is required for fast-setting polyurea that gels in seconds. Low-pressure systems mix at a few hundred psi and spray slower-curing polyurethane. High pressure gives faster cure and higher throughput; low pressure gives a lower entry cost, far lower electrical demand, and a much more forgiving spray window.

Yes, and thousands do. Low pressure handles truck beds, trailers, toolboxes, flooring and OEM work fine. The ceiling is throughput — beyond roughly five or six beds a day, cure time becomes your bottleneck and high pressure starts to make sense.

For high pressure — usually. Or a transformer. Or a generator. A PHX-40 carrying 21 kW heaters pulls 142 amps at single-phase 230V, 82 on three-phase, and plenty of shop buildings simply cannot feed that without a service upgrade. Low-pressure equipment asks for a fraction of it and drops into most existing buildings as-is.

Both are professional-grade. Both will do the work. PMC's PKX-25 was built with truck accessory and body shops in mind, and its air-driven pumps bring the entry cost down. Graco's Reactor line has an enormous parts network behind it. Honestly though, the badge on the machine matters less than who formulated the chemistry going through it, who trained your operator, and who answers when something goes sideways at 9 p.m.

A few days of training and a stack of practice panels gets you to basic competence. Clean edges and consistent texture — the stuff customers actually notice — takes a few more weeks. Low pressure is easier to learn on, and the reason is chemical rather than mechanical. Longer working time forgives hesitation. Hand a beginner a high-pressure gun running a six-second gel, though, and the margin for a bad decision more or less disappears.

Compressed air with proper drying, surface prep equipment (DA sander, abrasives, degreaser), masking supplies, ventilation, and shop space around 24×30 minimum. Budget $3,000–$8,000 for the shop side if you're starting from an empty building — considerably less if you're an established body shop.

No. No franchise fee, no royalties, no percentage of your gross. You buy equipment and material. For comparison, LINE-X charges a $50,000 franchise fee plus 5.4% royalty and 1.5% ad fund on gross sales.

Third-party equipment financing is available if capital timing is the sticking point. We don't finance in-house, but we'll point you at people who do this every day.

latest news & bLOGS

Learn more

Get a quote against your actual building

If you're still reading, you're serious. Call us and ask for a real quote against your actual building, your actual power, and the volume you actually expect. We'll ask what your panel says. We'll ask how many beds a day. And if the honest answer is that you should start smaller than you were planning, we'll tell you that too — because a dealer who outgrows his equipment in two years is a much better outcome for everybody than one who buys too much machine and quits.

Start A Bedliner Business
Request Equipment Pricing

United States 417-831-5090 • Canada 780-444-6200

CONTACT US

REQUEST A QUOTE OR

BECOME AN APPLICATOR

ArmorThane has built a strong reputation over the past 30 years for producing high-quality, durable protective coatings.

group 115 660555abebfe4
Phone Number

Tel: 417.831.5090

group 115 1 660556c21395c
Email Us

moreinfo@armorthane.com

Step 1 of 3

To help us prepare for a discussion with you, please provide some information on the type of Protective Coating business you are considering, including where your business would be located.

RV Find An Applicator

Step 1 of 3

Connect with an authorized ArmorThane professional to get a long-lasting, seamless protective coating for your RV. Submit the form below or call us directly at 417-831-5090 (Monday–Friday, 8:00 AM – 5:00 PM CST).

Facebook Twitter Youtube

Find An Applicator

Applicator Login

Armorthane Logo Outlined
CALL NOW
BECOME APPLICATOR
FIND APPLICATOR

Protective Coating Applications

Products

Applicator Opportunities

Knowledge Center

Galleries