Anyone Remember the Testors Plastic Airbrush

I’ve always had a fear of dual action brushes. I’m not good at doing one thing at a time, asking for two is is a lot! I fell down the Gaahleri rabbit hole during their big Christmas sale last year and ended up with a couple of dual action brushes. Turns out they aren’t all that complicated or hard to use. I’m still not the best but fairly often, the paint actually ends up on the model and doesn’t look too awful.

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I went down almost exactly the same rabbit hole with Gaahleri! My first one actually came free with a compressor, and then I started trying different airbrushes. Before long I had about four of them and wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with all of them. :joy:

I’ve finally settled into rotating between three Gaahleri brushes: 0.5, 0.38 and 0.2 mm. They each have a different purpose, and I’ve found I really like working that way. The 0.5 is the Mobius TG trigger-style brush, which I’ve especially come to like.

Here’s my current setup. Apparently the Gaahleri rabbit hole isn’t such a bad place to end up!

Lasermike, I know what you mean! I have a nice double action Iwata that works perfectly fine. It’s the operator that is faulty! I still don’t have that rhythm worked out in my my muscle memory, so I have opened the paint flow without pushing down for air a couple of times and got paint dribbling out of the nozzle.

I had one of those - felt like a toy. Really nice wooden box though. My first air brush was a single action Binks Wren I saved up for and bought around middle school I’d say. I do 99% of my work with a single action Paasche H - such a workhorse and easy to clean. I have a few double action brushes and have some decent results but I just cant seem to clean them properly. So subsequent uses are less successful. I intend to watch a bunch of videos on the cleaning and care of these precision tools and master it. I have two brand new double action airbrushes I want to take care of properly.

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I completely understand the cleaning issue. When I first started using dual-action airbrushes, cleaning them took an exorbitant amount of time and honestly made airbrushing a lot less fun (plus I wasn’t any good at really getting them clean).

Once I figured out a routine, though, that completely changed. I can do a normal between-color or end-of-session clean in probably a minute and a half or two minutes now, and even a complete deep clean only takes me about five minutes.

If you decide to give the dual action another try, I’d be happy to walk you through what I do. Once I got the cleaning part down, it stopped being a chore.

I’m definitely going to figure this out so please do let me know your routine. I’ve got this on the bench :grimacing:

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Nothing would happen - the ‘lifetime’ warranty was cancelled years before the Aztek went out of production.

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Oh, I realize that, I was just kidding.

What kind of paint do you use? It makes a bid difference for cleaning.

All solvent based stuff: Enamels, Mr Color, Tamiya - I don’t use water based acrylics, couldn’t figure out how to make them work.