I need to show you some of my Christmas presents.
Not from a boastful point of view. (“Look what Santa brought me, I must have been a verrrrry good boy!”) But because it impacts plans for the MR2. Let’s think of this post as a New Year’s resolution. Although I’ve been on the planet for 50 some years and I’ve never kept a resolution yet, so don’t go getting too excited.
I’ve had an airbrush for years but never used it much. Well I’ve got some adaptors so I can connect it to my compressor.

I suspect it’ll be way too small but the idea is that I can use it to blow in small repair spots on the car.
I’ve heard that this works quite well so it’s worth playing with. I’ll let you know how it goes.
I’m going to have to sort out the pressure regulator on the water trap first though. Normally it’s wide open and puts the full tank pressure through. I’m not sure the airbrush will enjoy 120 PSI up it’s poor little end. It’d probably pepper the car with its internal parts. When I wound the regulator down it dropped the pressure but kept the compressor running trying to get back up to pressure. Almost as if I’ve got it in backwards but I don’t believe I have.
Next on the list is this - which isn’t a Christmas present.

It’s a cheap rubbish spray gun that came with some air tools when I got the compressor. So it’s quite old.
I have used it from time to time. The last job it did was to blow primer on the guttering a few years ago. When I looked at it recently all the rubber seals had failed. Well Santa brought me a box of random sized rubbers.
And some seals for the gun. Boom boom!!
(It’s like a joke but not very funny.)
Now… it happens to have a 1.5mm fluid tip so it’s in the ball park for blowing primer on the car. I was going to use a 2 pack primer and a roller so if it doesn’t go on too smoothly I was expecting to flat it off anyway. Which begs the question… I was dead against spraying 2 pack paints because I can’t do it safely. So what’s changed?
I stumbled across Lechler 29107 non-isocyanate primer. Lechler is a decent company as far as I know so it’s worth a punt with the crappy old gun.
So what about colour and clear coat then? Well the colour will have to be cellulose. For the clear I’ve found UPOL 20-85. It’s a single pack clear intended for SMART repairs so you just bung it in the gun and spray. The blurb says it “gives 2K performance with the convenience of a single pack” which is probably rubbish but again, UPOL is a well known company so it’s worth a go. I suspect it might not be efficient in that it might take a lot of product though.
So I need something to stick this paint (that I’ve not yet bought) to the car. And it won’t be the crappy gun above!
Santa came up trumps again.

It’s a DeVilbiss FLG 5. I nearly went for the cheaper SLG 610 but you can’t get rebuild kits for them. And the FLG 5 gets some very good reviews.
It’s probably a lot better than I am but that’s the way I want it. If I can’t get a decent finish with this thing it’s definitely my problem! Can’t blame the tools.
The other bits are a final moisture trap and a gun pressure regulator.
So here’s a question. What’s the difference between the crappy gun and the DeVibiss? Why is the cheap crappy gun worth nothing and the FLG 5 worth a fair bit?
Well, for example, take look at the air caps.

The quality of the engineering on the DeVilbiss is just lovely. The air cap has been machined and made to sit exactly concentric to the paint outlet in the middle. Something that’s not guaranteed in the cheap one.
It’s a thing of great beauty. I just hope I’m up to the job and can learn to use it well enough to make it worth the investment.
So that leaves me with another problem. My old compressor and the likelihood of water in the airline.
As it stands the compressor feeds into a copper pipe to try and cool the air. There is then a water trap, followed by a dead leg (again in copper) to try and take the moisture out. It’s good enough for the air tools but not for painting so I’ll be replumbing some of the garage.

The copper pipe is to make a cooling ‘radiator’ in the garage loft space (which is shaded by the house so always stays cool) to condense the water out of the air. And the thing that looks like a scaffold tube is a scaffold tube. That’ll get turned into a proper dead leg to trap the water. Then it’ll go through the existing water trap and into the existing pipework.
More of this another day.
So then we come to the compressor. One of the reasons for considering the SLG 610 was that it used relatively little air and my compressor would have been ok. But the FLG 5 uses a fair bit more so there is a fair chance that I’ll need an upgrade on the compressor front. Something with two cylinders. Anyway, we’ll see how things go as to whether that’s necessary. But I suspect it probably will be.
But…
None of this happens until I do the tedious job of cleaning the garage up a little and dumping a load of junk because, at the moment, I can barely get through the door let alone replumb the compressor.
James
