Airbrush Kit & Test & Review Of Harbor Freight’S New Airbrush And Compressor Combo – Is It Worth It ?
Category : PCB Products
We’re going to take a look at some inexpensive single action air brushes from harbor freight as well as my main air brush the cache model h airbrush kits, this is the brush, I’ve been happily using for years now there are two basic air brush types, single action and double action, the brushes will look at today are all single action, I’ll leave some links below that go into greater detail about the differences between the two but for my purposes I just wanted a simple air brush that would lay down an even coat of paint on my small models and this is what a single action, brush does really well push down the button for air and paint, that’s it, sort of like a little aerosol can, but better paasche airbrush.Here, I’d like to show what I typically use my air brush for and that is to simply lay down thin coats of paint, usually acrylic and sometimes with masking tape on building kits, these are all micro trains kits by the way.I’ll also do some light weathering with the air brush, but most of my weathering is done separately by hand on this small craft repair building coming up, you can see a little bit of gray at the bottom of the building and that was applied with an air brush, now I could use regular aerosol cans for this type of application, but too many times aerosol paint and splatter or I can’t readily find a color I like, or it just comes out of a can to heavy covering up small details with models, this size, that’s kind of a problem as detail really is everything.So I was in harbor freight recently and as you do you buy stuff you don’t really need because it’s cheap, here’s a harbor freight knockoff of a badger three fifty air brush now this next air brush is kind of interesting it’s basically the same model, but a slightly older version, you can tell the older packaging and different part number, I’ve been meaning to try this out and I thought well let’s get the newer version and try them both out.Now this last brush kit, now I had to buy it because well because it was only ten dollars I think an upset there it looks interesting though.And my last harbor freight purchase for this visit was an air brush holder now I’ve kind of have something here in my studio that I’ve rigged up to hold the air brush, but I thought again ten dollars seems to be the magic number for me if it’s ten bucks and if it’s in harbor freight I’m probably gonna buy it, so we have a layer brush holder and it looks reasonably sturdy, what can go wrong.This holder can take four brushes and these yellow plastic bits are I believe better suited to hold a double action gravity feed style brush which I don’t currently use now these red rubberized hooks up on top work well with saif and brushes that have a paint cup or a paint jar that’s lower than the main body of the air brush okay, we’ve got the preliminary stuff out of the way, let’s look at the brushes.First up is the patchy h the red handle is plastic but the rest of the brushes all metal and to me it has a great feel in the hand I also like the metal quarter ounce paint cup, it comes with. Next up we have the new version of the badger three fifty copy now, this comes with a paint jar and a plastic air hose and a few other fittings, one nice thing here is that it can also take the cache metal paint cup which I really prefer over the included paint jar on small models you’re often only using a very small amount of paint and the paint cup works really well.And here’s the quick change air brush kit, this one’s interesting as the air and paint nozzles are both exposed the principle is the same in all these brushes high air pressure draws the paint from the paint jar or cup and the pain is then atom ized in this brush though it’s all done outside the body of the brush, it’s kind of cool probably the biggest reason to use an air brush in my opinion, well the two biggest reasons is that you can control the paint flow and animas ation for a better finish and you can use virtually any paint expensive and expensive really old paint as well before I began using an air brush I can’t tell you how many times a can of spray paint would clog up on me just from sitting around for too long and a full can of paint would end up in the garbage.What you’re seeing on screen now is an extreme example of an old old bottle of metal primer latex metal primer, it’s been sitting so long that there’s a ton of skin that I’m pulling out but once this paint was mixed with a little thinner, it went on beautifully through the air brush, you really don’t get that kind of longevity with conventional spray cans.For testing out, these air brushes, I’m using some equally old chalky craft paints as well as a copper metallic paint, now, looking back I probably should have used some more gloss paints here, but I always used flat paints for my kits and just did the same for these tests I’m adding in some tammy X twenty a thinner and mixing with a battery powered paint mixer.These tests are really just to show how I use my patchy as more or less a glorified spray can, though a very good one.The way to adjust the paint flow is roughly the same on all these brushes and that is to adjust the nozzle that delivers the pain which is what I’m doing right here, the air pressure is then set separately by a compressor adjustment.I normally don’t do air brush work, this close to a model just wanted to get the brush into the camera shot here now, this is how I use my air brush most of the time as I said before it’s really I look at it as a glorified spray can with just lots more control I tend to use a fairly high air pressure setting and have the nozzle choke down to keep the pain flow at a minimum, this gives me thin coats to drive very quickly, I’ll add a link below in the description to another youtuber who reviewed the quick change air brush the one will look at in just a minute.He does painting on the backs of plastic spoons which is where I got this idea, cool idea, he’s got a channel where it presents a lot of great air brush related info and it’s definitely worth checking out. Here, I’m spraying the very flat chalky paint with a low paint flow and a fairly high air pressure, the paint dries quickly and you can see there’s not a lot of over spray happening.Just for the heck of it I decided to throw a can of tammy a primer into the mix or to me a primer, I’m not quite sure anyway, this aerosol is generally considered to be one of the best spray paints, you can buy for model painting, this kind of primer sells for just around thirteen dollars on Amazon more than any of our harbor freight air brushes.Here’s the paint bottle that comes with a new version of the harbor freight badger three-fifty clone off topic a bit here, but they use some kind of magic glue on these labels, I’d like some of this glue from my car repairs look at this stuff.Once cleaned, you can see the size of this bottle compared to the patch a paint cup, if you do use this harbor freight brush I would recommend picking up one of these paint cups on ebay or Amazon as I feel they’re just more convenient. I found this harbor freight brush produced similar results to the cache but didn’t quite have the smoothness in the paint flow adjustment, also the air hose that came with this kit leak just a bit around the fittings again I’m definitely biased towards the cache, perhaps because I’ve been using it for so many years and I’m just used to the feel of it.Here’s the older version of this harbor freight brush, they made a few small design tweaks on the newer version, but this old brush gave me similar results, you can see I’m using the pash a pink up here instead of the included paint bottle.This brush like its newer counterpart doesn’t quite have the same smooth feel as the cache in my opinion, but the results using this copper painter again pretty similar to the cache, not bad for a ten Dollar brush even with its slightly leaky hose. We’re now on to the quick change air brush kit, here’s one of the five included paint bottles with the adjustable fluid cap, you turn a counterclockwise for maximum pain flow clockwise for minimum flow I wish they would have included glass bottles instead of these plastic bottles but it is a ten Dollar kid, after all.The body of this brush is definitely interesting, very lightweight and woefully and before I began painting I noticed a pretty strong leak coming from the hose fitting but the unique feature of this brush is the jar adapter and its quick change ability from color to color, since no paint ever gets in the body or on the air brush nozzle, all you’ll need to clean after painting are the jars.On my brush, the threads were a little wonky, it almost felt like the air nozzle was cross threaded I’ve seen this brush reviewed by other people on Youtube, so I’m definitely willing to concede that my brush maybe a little off, or that I’m just not overly comfortable with this brush style, so I really don’t want to knock the brush, it’s really important I think to keep in mind the price of this brush and what it may be best suited to I think if I work with it a bit more I could smooth out some of what I found to be its rough edges.Here’s where I think this brush really shines the fast color changes, now the plastic parts on the brush and jars meet together pretty well snapping together with a nice positive feel with a lower paint flow set on the jars fluid cap, this copper paint seemed to go on a bit smoother than the previous blue chalk paint again if I work with this brush a bit more I think I could improve as a rule I really don’t like blaming a tool for my results, one thing I really don’t care for with these paint jars and that’s the cleaning up job, it’s made a bit more difficult because they’re plastic, this is another reason I prefer brushes that can use a small open paint cup.Now let’s look at some spoons as I mentioned earlier, there is another Youtube channel that did this spoon test using at least one of these harbor freight brushes and I would definitely recommend checking out that channel I’ll leave that link below the pass a brush did a nice even job on these spoons especially on this one, the copper metallic paint.The tammy, um seemed to produce more fuzzies than I’d like though the humidity was low and the distance to the model was close, so I’m not quite sure why.These next two brushes, the newer and older version of the harbor freight badger three-fifty clone both produced pretty solid results close to being on par with the cache, this was kind of a surprise, pick up a better air hose and a metal paint cup for a few bucks and this becomes a much better tool for good basic paint coverage.Finally, the harbor freight quick change brush on the flat colours, it did well I’d say on par with the tammy rattle can which was a little surprising on the copper metallic it got a little blotchy I do think I could improve though with a little practice, using this brush at the end of the day I simply want my air brush to give me reliable.