Neo for Iwata airbrush update

neo-iwataAn update on my experience with the Neo for Iwata airbrush I bought almost two years ago and with which I have struggled. Turns out, I’ve been using it upside down, or rather, I’ve been inserting the needle chucking guide (part 7) turned 180° the wrong way, in other words, with the small prong pointing down, not up, as is clearly shown in the instructions, but which I never noticed.

needle-chucking-guide
I inserted this part rotated 180° the wrong way (around the shaft)!

I had complained before of the poor action of the brush, which I have solved simply by inserting the part the correct way round. It now has a lovely action and I have exceedingly fine control of air pressure and paint flow. I can also blow just air to dry what I’ve  painted, which never worked before (a little paint always leaked out).

Another discovery is that I don’t need to thin my paint to the degree I did before, nor do I need to add a drying retarder.

My modeling life has further improved by the realization that shaking paint is EVIL! I’ve switched to one of those paint stirrers (mine is actually a modified cocktail stirrer) and discovered that I’ve never properly dislodged the paint sitting at the bottom of the bottle. An additional benefit of stirring is that paint never contacts the lid to form that cruft around the lip of the bottle. And stirring introduces far less air into the paint, causing it to flow far more easily through an airbrush.

 

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Jennifer Petkus divides her time between writing Jane Austen-themed mysteries, creating websites for the dead, woodworking, aikido and building model starships. She has few credentials, having failed to graduate from the University of Texas with a journalism degree, but did manage to find employment at the Colorado Springs Sun newspaper as a cop reporter, copy editor and night city editor before the paper died in 1986. She has done little since. Her husband is the night editor at The Denver Post. Her best friend is a cop. She watched Neil Armstrong walk on the Moon live. She is the author of, Good Cop, Dead Cop: A Novel about the AfterNet. She’s writing the sequel, The Background Noise of Souls, and another AfterNet related story, Jane Austen’s Book Tour.

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