It has literally been decades since I have done any bodywork or serious painting. I was taking stock of my collection of older guns in anticipation of the up coming bodywork on my pickup. My inventory of spray equipment yielded a Binks, a DeVibus MBC, a nice little DeVilbus touchup gun a few Sears guns and a Campbell Hossfield, all of them siphon feed guns. The biggest problem with these old guns is that they have been sitting around for years, in some cases decades. The packings and rubber are all dried out and you can’t get parts for them any more. I didn’t own a gravity feed gun, because when they first came on the scene they always looked off balanced to me, kind of like trying to balancing a basket ball on the back of your palm.
Now I’m kind of a snob so I usually wear a disguise so none of my friends recognize me when I go in to the Harbor Freight store, you know, the dark glasses, hat and collar turned up kind of thing. But on a couple of my visits when they had gravity feed spray guns and touchup guns on sale for $6.95 I just couldn’t pass up a deal like that and pocked up a couple of each. I figured no matter what the quality of the merchandise they still had to be good enough for shootin primer or Por15. I was very surprised to find that the workmanship was not all that bad. I mean they have a fairly nice feel to them and the tips are actually mad of brass not pot metal. I haven’t sprayed anything with them yet so I can’t say how they perform. I was wondering about the tips, both guns come with1.5mm tips. I often hear our painters here talking about different size tips depending on the material that they are applying. I suppose that the 1.5mm tip is a good all round size, besides I don’t think that you can get other tips from Harbor Freight. What exactly is a 1.5 mm tip anyway, I mean where exactly is that dimension taken at? My old guns, if they had any numbers at all on the tips they were like a No. 1 or No.50 tip etc., and bythe way I never knew what that meant either.
The day is probably gonna comes to get serious about painting the old gal and I’ll be calling Eastwood and ordering a new set of DeVilbus guns like they’ve got on their catalog cover this month. But in the mean time, I got a lot of not so fancy priming and painting jobs like the framework and suspension that I hope I can get through with the oddball equipment that I have now.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
