Originally posted by Beelzebrush
An Aztek airbrush maybe.... the burning question, however, is are they any good.
Depends on what you want them to do.
What airhead said sums up some of the Aztek\'s strengths and weaknesses but do bear in mind that he\'s not exactly pro-Aztek
Many of the things we need an airbrush to do an Aztek
can do just fine, it\'s just not the \"all things to all people\" brush that it could be (but then neither are most of the competitors it must be said).
You can search CMON under my name here for other stuff I\'ve posted about the Aztek (more in
this thread on planetFigure) but let me touch on some of the major points.
Downsides first:
IME also, using acrylics or vinyl paint, you do
have to disassemble the tips (
like here) to be able to clean them thoroughly; you don\'t have to do this every time you spray but it must be done periodically and the problem can be worse with certain brands than with others. Specific colours can clog more than others too. The makers advise you never do this as you cannot get the tip back together at \"factory settings\" but it\'s really no biggie in practice. Don\'t be under any illusions about how difficult to clean a traditional airbrush design is though -
one slip and that\'s the needle gone, often - and the cost of a mistake on your part can be prohibitive with some models.
Azteks, while perfectly capable of fine mists and other subtle spraying techniques, are not really capable of doing consistent fine lines and some other types of really close work (bearing in mind this is partly down to operator skill and compressor quality too). So if that is something you really need your brush to do then they are not the best choice.
Upsides:
If you buy online, and you comparison shop carefully, they\'ll still work out as
the cheapest brush for what they give you; multiple nozzles in any of the common sets being the major thing - that price you\'re paying is not for \'one airbrush\'.
Example.
The replacement quick-fit colour cups (not built into the airbrush body like many traditional brushes) are also a good feature if you like to move along at a good clip. And although you might not have a need for this feature much you can spray at any angle - including upside down! - because they can be rotated, without any problem of dripping paint or any change in paint feed. This feature now copied by other airbrushes incidentally.
Most of the double-action Azteks can be run in fixed single-action mode, which is good for consistency when production-lining and helpful for the occasional user.
...
As you\'ll also see in one or two prior threads here, brush aside the main cost of moving to airbrushing is often actually the compressor. Any decent compressor is likely to cost at least as much as the airbrush, and could be as much as five times the cost of the brush... well it is if you don\'t pay through the nose for something like a Sotar 20/20 at 420 bucks or an Iwata Custom Micron-B at 350 bucks lol
Einion
