Airbrush Fail . . .
Rather than start a new thread, I thought I'd resurrect an old one, whine and complain a bit, and then the old thread can work its way down again over the next few weeks.
Benchwork done and painted, track glued down, wiring done, DCC decoders installed, lots of trouble free testing with my very small fleet of rolling stock, and got my first structure built, now just need to paint it.
Got myself a harbor freight kit (double-action) and tried to paint antique white polyscale with it. It kind of worked okay, but truth is the spray pattern is way too small (compressor maintains 30 psi while spraying, no thinning of paint) for what I want to do and the test paint I did on some scrap styrene (thank you, God, for making sure I tried a test first) looked pretty bad. I realize the airbrush I got has a 0.35 mm tip, so maybe it is just too small to expect a nice wide pattern (I would like something like a spray can NOT on steroids). I think I may invest is a paasche talon with the three different tip sizes and both the regular and fan spray caps so I can experiment with different setups, but it definitely slows me down a bit (I should wait for the next billing cc billing cycle to avoid raised eyebrows from the director of capital expenditures). In the meantime, a coworker pointed out that there is a Badger 150 set at work that was purchased about 7 years ago and has yet to be used . . .I may try that with the 0.5 tip and see if I get better results.
Anyway, sorry for the long post that pretty much doesn't help anyone but me (in a psychotherapy sort of way). Maybe in an effort to redeem the post, I'll thank several individuals who have participated in a couple of active airbrush threads over the past few weeks . . . I have appreciated reading others' experiences and opinions.