I’d like to pass on some information about my airbrushes. One day while shopping for tools at Harbor Freight I bought one of their cheapie single action airbrushes. It worked so good that I went back and bought four more to have quick color change ability. I made a five port manifold from brass pipe parts from Home Depot that fixed me up for painting.
I clean my nozzles with Acetone, while that cleans the entire airbrush very thoroughly and quickly it’s tough on the needle valve O-ring. After several years of cleaning the O-rings finally gave it up. I tried Harbor Freight for parts but was told that parts are unavailable. After a bit of research I found a replacement O-ring, a Vinton 1RHL9 fits the HF needle valve perfect. I did an eBay search and in three days I had a bag of 25 O-rings, I’m back in business with my airbrushes.
Good to know. I’ve never used an airbrush but want to get one to try, and the HF ones are quite inexpensive compared to the well-known name ones. Good to know it’s a decent tool - it’s a poor craftsman blames his tools, but a really bad tool is just murder on someone trying to learn to use it.
I learned using a Paasche single action about 40 years ago and over the years I’ve never run into a bad airbrush. I really never got the hang of a dual action.
I used a Badger 350 for years, the HF is a China duplicate of the 350 and I can’t tell the difference. The nozzle on the Badger has a finer thread for finer tuning but for everything I paint that’s not a problem. I pretty much stick with a ½” circle at 3” @ 35 lbs. for painting freight rolling stock and ⅜” for my Daylight streamline cars and diesels.
The HF ¼” x 10’ airbrush hose for $8.50 is the best one I’ve found. The hose that come with the airbrush isn’t worth much.
Don’t use the HF bottles, get a Badger spray cap from your LHS and shoot out of the paint bottle. Saves time and a lot of paint pouring from bottle to bottle. Helps wi
One thing I learned about the HF air brush set is to make sure it’s assembled properly. When I first got mine it didn’t work very well. I set it aside to try again later. After taking the airbrush apart I found out it had been assembled incorrectly at the factory. Since then it’s worked quite well for me. Tom
I’ve used a single action Badger for a while, but wanted to try a 2 stage. Couldn’t afford one of the big ones, so bought the HF. It hasn’t been a hard transtion to the dual action and I’ve found I really prefer the ease of control I get. For the cheap price the HF is a good brush.
With several hobby paint brands going down the tubes I ended up using TCP for my rolling stock and locomotives. Tru-Color Paint is solvent based (my preference) and the Acetone works great for cleaning my airbrushes.
I really like the TCP paints, their SP Daylight colors are a much closer match to the real thing than I had experienced with Floquil or Scalecoat. I also find it sprays much better too.
I rarely use Acrylics in my airbrushes, when I do water works fine for cleanup.
Badger makes bottle cap adapters for suction fed airbrushes in sev
Randy, I have a couple Badger 200H airbrushes. They’re single action and once I got the hang of diluting the paint to the desired consistency, I wondered why I waited so long to get one.