Airbrush

Has anyone attached an external air tank to their airbrush compressor. Mine is a relatively expensive set up but can't cope with continuous spraying. I thought that a tank might buffer use and enable me to spray a larger area.

Sounds like a good idea. What pressure does it use.

Steve.

It can go up to 100 lb but I generally spray at 30 lb. drops to under 20 very quickly.

Picked up an old airbrush compressor at a motorbike jumble last year, it had no tank but instead about a hundred foot of windscreen washer sized plastic hose wrapped around it as a reservoir, got it home cleaned it up and replaced plastic hose with a couple of sodastream gas cylinders and it now works beautifully, would also work with a small fire extinguisher as a reservoir.

Where is the regulator on your setup? If you are using a reservoir at 30 psi it can't contain much air, if the reservoir is storing air at say 100 psi then its holding more than 3 times the capacity.

Small MIG CO2 bottles are "non Refillable", but would make super reservoirs for an air brush.

Sounds like your spray head is too large for the pump

My first Revell basic airbrush compressor suffered from pulsing & I made a receiver from a carbonated drinks bottle

I used a smaller (bottle 1 litre, from the look of it), as all this type of bottle seem to be blown form the same basic injection moulded cartridge &. the smaller bottles have a thicker wall. IIRC the burst pressure of these bottles is well over normal working pressures for an airbrush (14 Bar rings a bell).

The fitting is an 1/8" BSP tee, with a male thread on the side & two females. A stainless steel penny washer is tapped 1/8" BSPT & screwed on to the male thread to provide a supporting & sealing face. The cap is drilled a close fit on the thread & a simple brass 1/8" BSPT nut holds the fitting to the cap. The whole lot was screwed on to the compressor outlet & the hose to the airbrush taken from the other side of the tee.

As a receiver it worked fine - no leaks - but the compressor didn't have the capacity to charge it. I ended up buying one of the small Chinese airbrush compressors with a built in receiver.

Nigel B.

The regulator is on the compressor. I bought the compressor and airbrush together from a small model shop. Took their advice on what to buy, looks like I didn't get good service.

Depends what models you are making, small AFVs, cars and figures won't have large areas like an RC plane or 5" g loco.

Even if you do add a tank the compressor may not have the FAD to keep up once you use up what's in the tank

If your compressor does not have a tank then it will always be playing catch up if your air consumption exceeds the capacity of the compressor. The answer would be to add a tank and set the regulator you have to, say, 100 psi so that the tank gets filled to is "maximum" and then add another regulator on the outlet from your tank set to your 30 psi spraying pressure. You will have to set your compressor running 5 minutes before you start a job to enable the tank to fill. If you don't like the idea of playing with a tank then a suitably rated large bore hose may suffice as a store, some small garage sized compressors use a mounting frame that doubles as an air storage chamber.

Having said all of that it may be easier to investigate the cost of a small garage size unit - it may prove cheaper than the modification of your existing system

To be fair the shop might not have known.

I once had a Burgess SR122 constant bleed set which came with an internal mix cap - terrible with cellulose primer so I got the external mix cap for the gun, this worked great if you wanted a water pistol. I later found with more air it was a very good set up that sprayed car paint very well. The point is the external cap packaging did not say 'only for the bigger compressor' and both units came with the same gun.

Before safety become an issue we used to use an old car tyre as a make-shift receiver. It would take up to 40PSI quite easily and provided a good buffer to prevent the compressor cutting in and out too often.