Cleaning Your Airbrush

Cleaning Your Airbrush
by Don Johnson
Airbrush Artist

This how-to airbrush article will cover cleaning your airbrush quickly and easily. Having a fun, relaxing experience during your airbrush projects it's essential you keep your airbrush clean so that it will function properly. Here in this how-to article I'll show the technique's I use to clean my airbrushes. Written by Don Johnson and brought to you by Airbrush Technique Magazine.


In this little example I will show you how I have been cleaning my bottom feed airbrush for years and hope you find it as useful as I have. This by the way is the only way I clean my airbrush regularly I might take my airbrush completely apart once a month if that.

Owning, working in a airbrush T Shirt shop in a Mall setting for years this is the best way I found to clean my airbrushes everyday.

What you will need for this:

Plastic bottle like pictured below with a York top, these you can purchase at just about any art or craft store.

A spay off can, waste basket (some where to spray the cleaning fluid) in this example I use my spray off area built into my easel. (For plans on building your own easel for under $100.00 check our

And of course a bottom feed airbrush such as Passche VL, Iwata BCS eclipse.

* Your favorite cleaning solution

This works equal as well with solvent based paint as it does water based paints.







Pictured below: With the bottle filled with your favorite cleaning solution insert the top of the York top into that part of your airbrush where the paint bottle, color cup inserts, attaches.


Pictured below: With the air turned on to your airbrush and with the airbrush pointed toward your spay off area depress the trigger and squeeze the plastic bottle forcing clean solution into the airbrush.




Pictured below: After you have sprayed a few minutes unscrew the chucking nut allowing you to pull the needle out.

[CENTER]

Pictured below: Pull the needle out and carefully wipe it off making sure there is no paint left on the needle.




Pictured below: With the needle in a safe place we will now repeat the York top cleaning but this time we will insert the York top into where your needle inserts into your airbrush as I'm pointing to below.





Pictured below: Again spray off your cleaning solution into the spray off area as we did before only this time forcing cleaning solution down into the the back of the airbrush. This will clean out the entire inside of your airbrush.






Pictured below: After spraying for a few seconds insert the needle back into the airbrush pull it back out, check it for paint, no paint you are good to go the airbrush is clean. I hope you found this helpful and believe if you follow these simple cleaning instructions you'll find cleaning your airbrush is really very easy.




One more little tip is when I'm done for the night and the airbrush is clean as instructed above I insert the needle but do not all the way leaving it just short of seating in the tip. This way when you start airbrushing next time first thing you will do is pull the needle to check it, insert it all the way back in, tighten the chucking nut, put back handle back on and spray away with an airbrush that functions properly. This just becomes habit after awhile and insures you have a nice clean needle, airbrush to start your day




Where to buy airbrush cleaner I provided some links below:








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