A MODELMAKER’S LIFE: BEST LAID PLANS AND AIRBRUSH CLEANING…

Servicing and deep-cleaning airbrushes is the not the most fun you can have in the workshop, but it’s vital if those important and extremely expensive tools, are to work at an optimum level.

12th November 2025

Having so impressively – or so I thought – managed to do all of the sub-assembly work on my Spitfire yesterday, my plan for today was some relaxing painting and then assembly of the airframe. It would be a simple day, painting construction, move on. But plans are meant to be broken, right? And so as is my want I broke them, though not entirely intentionally…

Yesterday, I mentioned, I think, that I’d ordered some spares to repair my damaged Iwata HP-CH. Expecting those to arrive at the weekend, I surprised to see them hit the front door mat first thing this morning. With them being to hand I decided to deal with the repairs and the deep clean that would be needed along the way this morning rather than leaving it for another day, thus relegating all of those earlier plans to an unwelcome, if not entirely warranted, second place.

First things first. I was really impressed by the service from The Airbrush Company. To see an order fulfilled and arrive within 24 hours of being placed was most impressive. It meant that I could almost seamlessly continue with work without having to wait for those important parts to arrive. As it turned out, any time gained by the early arrival of the package was wiped out by the time I spent working on the three airbrushes I use day to day, but you get the picture.

Servicing and deep-cleaning airbrushes is the not the most fun you can have in the workshop, but it’s vital if those important and extremely expensive tools, are to work at an optimum level. So today, I broke down the three that I use most often, the Iwata HP-CH, the Procon Boy PS-270 and budget Fengda FE-183K, into their constituent parts and set about returning them to factory fresh condition.

Most of the time I try and keep the brushes together as much as possible. Experience has taught me that the more often you break a brush down, the greater the chance of damage during that process, and the subsequent rebuilds that must inevitably follow. These tools are delicate, so it’s very easy to alter their performance through heavy handedness, so I tend to keep them clean(ish) following use with blow-throughs with thinners, rather than taking everything apart after every session. It’s only after a few months that I strip everything down to remove unwanted gunk, a job that was carried out today on all three of the aforementioned airbrushes.

Though I find this process easy enough (I’m sure I could strip and reassemble an Iwata brush, blindfolded) it does take up a considerable amount of time. Each brush has to be broken down, parts checked and then everything deep-cleaned using solvents, cotton buds and time in an ultrasonic bath. In total, each brush took around 90 minutes to fully clean before being ready to reassemble for use. Like I say, it’s a bit of a time-sink.

Though the brushes had actually been working reasonably well, I was astonished by the amount of accumulated paint found in particular inside the HP-CH, to a point where repeated baths and then work with acetone was needed to remove everything. This was particularly so in front of the trigger, an area that wraps around the needed before passing through the colour cup on its way to the nozzle. Being so hidden, I had to carefully remove the buildup without damaging any of the internals, a job that took way longer than I wanted it to, hence the lack of modelling today!

As it stands, all of the brushes are now back together. During reassembly, I was careful to reseat everything accurately and then where needed, apply Iwata Lube around moving parts such as the triggers and also around some of the threaded parts, thus allowing all to move freely once more. Sat in my hand and powered up using my Sparmax compressor, all of the brushes are perfectly clean and feel as good as new in use, just as I hoped would be the case before my day of airbrush servicing began, midway through this morning.

See you tomorrow.