Cleaning Your Airbrush

[silentghost]

Just out of curiosity, I have just gotten into airbrushing the dye onto my leather. Wish I had done this sooner! What do ya'll use to clean up your airgun parts with? I am using the Feibings dye in various colors, and just wondered when you clean up your gun and all that good stuff, what do you use to do it? Thinner? or.... Thanks in adavance! I have the Badger 155 Anthem if it matters.

[Art]

I'm pretty sure the 155 Anthem has PTFE needle bearings so you should be able to use alcohol to clean the airbrush. Put some in a jar, dump out the airbrush, hook up the jar and spray some alcohol through the system. You can back flush if you think it is particularly dirty. Depending on what you are blowing, you might want to disassemble and clean every time, or not.

Art

[silentghost]

Thanks for the reply. I really appreciate it.

[daveottawa]

I use Medea Airbrush Cleaner fluid but most of the time just plain Windex with my Iwata brushes. Once in a while I soak parts soak in Windex for a few hours if they need it. (Don't soak the body.) Don't ferget to lube the shaft of the needle when you reassemble it.

Here's a good link. http://www.airbrushguru.com/cleaning-your-airbrush.html

[Art]

The Medea Airbrush Cleaner is great for Acrylic paint and ink (real thin paint), if you use small tips (.2 or .25) you might get some clogging and have to constantly clean the airbrush. When this happens, I keep a bucket of water and clean in there, just dunk the whole thing in (be careful of the tip as you will probably be running without the cover) and spray, take out and clean the needle. With small tips and fast drying paints, you will have to clean the needle often, sometimes just milking the buildup off the needle with your fingers.

Spirit dyes, if thinned appropriately (1:1 or more) usually spray pretty well, even with small tips, just remember that they dry fast and if you are going to let the brush set for 10 or more minutes, keep a bottle of cleaner around and run some through the airbrush so the dye doesn't dry in the brush.

If you do a lot of close work, you may want to go to a gravity feed later on, but it seems most of us learned on a siphon feed, and they can't be beat for large areas.

Art