Hi everybody,
I own a Iwata HP CR airbrush, I've had it for 2 weeks, I've painted multiple times with it Tamiya Acrylics without any problem until yesterday.
Yesterday I first painted some x-18 semi gloss black without any problem as usual, then I flush/clean the airbrush and I decide to try some xf-56 metallic grey on a plastic spoon to see how that color looks like. So I thin it 5:6 (paint:thinner) and the PSI is at 20 as always for me. And there my problem began and it's not easy to explain so I'll try my best:
you know a double action airbrush, you press down you have air, you pull back you have paint. And you can adjust the amount of paint sprayed by how much you pull the trigger back. Well that didn't worj for me ! That's what happened: when I pulled back nothing came out, so I pulled more and more until finally painted came but of course it came a big splash of paint since at that point I was pulling back so much. Then I stop and I pull back again just a bit, a fine line starts to draw and after barely 2 seconds no more paint coming out again, so I pulled a bit more and a thicker lie appears to stop again 2 seconds laters and so on. So the thing was that I couldn't get a consistent paint flow. I always had pull the trigger back and forth to get any paint coming out.
So I thought that there must be some paint left in there not cleaned well. So I emptied the cup and recleaned the airbrush, now my cleaning procedure is this:
- take out the needle and wipe it with windex and then with water and then wipe it dry
- put some windex in the cup and take a brush to clean it
- then I take one of those "airbrush cleaning brushes" and I clean the inside the airburhs, you know that part where the needle goes in, from the cup to the nozzle
- then I rince this with water, I clean the nozzle cap if needed, I put the needle back in and I spray some water to rince.
So after cleaning I put paint again some amount of paint and thinner, and I have the same problem again. I'm worried something is broken. I decide to add more thinner and more thinner but that didn't work. So I checked the Iwata manual and they talk about clogging (I'm not sure what that is by the way) but I see a part called the nozzle which can actually be removed. So I empty the cup again and I decide to reclean but a bit deeper this time. I remove the nozzle and I see me red on it. And I thought, that's it !! Cause I had painted red paint as my first acrylic paint 2 weeks before and I had a bit of a hard time to clean it the first time. So I reomve that red very easily. Then I do my usual cleaning procedure and I decide to remove the trigger and the parts holding it, and I pass a brush there with first a bit of windex and then water and then dry. I also decided to clean fron the nozzle to the cup (where the needle goes) with a rush with windex and water. At that point it was lunch time so I put everything back and didn't touch it since then.
My questions then are:
- what do you think caused that problem with my paint ? Not enough pressure ?
- and mostly about the nozzle and that red thing on it, on Don's blog that this seems to be a seal but I of course didn't know that. So I wonder how critical it is that I removed that and if I could put some basic seal tape instead ?
Thank you so much for reading and helping.