Interchanging .5 & .35 needles in Iwata HP-CR?

Tools, Techniques, and Reference Materials Painting and airbrushing
1

Hello everyone. I am getting into modeling, and decided to buy an airbrush. After two days of searching these forums, and everywhere else on the internet, I think I have narrowed my choices down to two Iwata air brushes. I am deciding between the HP-CR (Eclipse) and the HP-CS (Eclipse).

I called customer service at Iwata and asked them about the two brushes. They told me the only real difference between the two models was that the “NEW” HP-CR has tefelon internals, why the HP-CS is solvent protected. The other main difference is that the HP-CS has a cut away handle designed for quickly cleaning the needle between paint changes. Other than that, they said the two needles will spray very similar to one another.

When I asked them about the different needle sizes (the HP-CR comes with a .5 mm, and the HP-CS comes with a .35mm), they confirmed what I already expected. The needles size should be selected by what types of paint you are wanting to use, not how fine a line you want to spray. If you are using thicker paint, pick the .5mm needle for example. If you want a finer line, then thin the paint down more, and spray with the same .5mm needle.

After this, he told me that both of these needle sizes (.5mm and .35mm) are very capable of spraying what I will be using the most, Master Model Enamles. He then said that you may be able to squeeze a slighlty thinner line with the HP-CS’s .35mm needle, but it wouldn’t be very noticeable on model painting.

With that said, I want to know if it is possible to purchase a .35mm HP-CS needle and put it into an HP-CR airbrush and get the same result I would get with the HP-CS? I also want to know if I would also have to replace the .5 nozzle with a .35 nozzle when I made this change-over? I know based on what this guy told me that this is probably not necessary, but it would be sure nice to know so I could go ahead and choose the HP-CR brush. I do trust what this guy was telling me by the way, simply because he was telling me that I would probably be fine with the $40 cheaper airbrush.

Any other comments are definitely welcome.

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Hocking: I’ll put my [2c] in.
If you want to be able to spray fine lines (and that is very important in scale models) you need lower air pressure (therfore thinner paint) and you must be close to the model. In order to spray at lower pressures you will likely find a gravity feed brush will be better. Because you don’t have to generate enough air pressure to “siphon” from a bottom mounted bottle, spraying at lower pressure works better. On the other hand, when you are covering large areas, the gravity feed brushes will not likely hold enough paint without re-filling. Most modelIers have more than one brush because of this. I have a Badger 200-NH (bottom feed) and an Omni 6000 (side feed). Neither one of those will make a thin enough line for my taste, so I ordered an Iwata HP-C+.
At any rate, I’m sure others will chime in here. I’d go with the .35 needle and if it won’t do everything you want it to do, get another airbrush [tup]. I have 4, which only proves that I don’t know what I’m talking about…[C):-)]
Hope that helps
Rich [8D]

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I have both airbrushes and they are both good, the CS does spray a finer line. You can get a .3mm nozzle for the CR Iwata part number ‘I 704-2’ you will have to get the matching nozzle cap and needle. So it might just be cheaper to get the CS. By the way the needle should match the nozzle so I wouldn’t try putting the CS needle in the CR as it will not make a difference in the spray and probally would make it worse. Hope this helps.
John

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I have the CR and unless you are planning on doing German squiggle patterns on 1/72 aircraft you would probably be more than happy with it… really fine detail ability…

If you just want to get something that can do very tight lines then the CS would be a go… I have friends who own them and swear by them… If you ever think you might do acrylics the CR might work better with the slightly larger nozzle/needle size… or hey… get both! [;)]