On the Aztek airbrush

(at the end of this post is a stop-gap measure to fix one of the known issues with this airbrush)*

Known by scores of modelers, equally loved and hated, it doesn’t need further introductions.

I have owned perhaps eight of them along a 28 year stretch or so. I also have an Iwata and a Badger. For some reason, operating the last two is for me uncomfortable, time consuming, and impractical. I hear a lot, about those more “professional” airbrushes, the statement “They are precision instruments”, which is absolutely correct. If I would be doing eye surgery, art restoration, or anything on the professional field, I would like to use a “precision instrument” that requires utmost care, expert handling, and lots of maintenance time. But I want the airbrush for my hobby, not for building a complex machine that goes on a satellite.

I have read, like many of you, the extensive threads on modeling sites and forums, discussing the virtues of the Aztek airbrush as well as its sometimes extremely frustrating shenanigans.

Aztek promoted from the start a much deceiving “Lifetime Warranty”, possibly to convince the potential buyers that their novel approach to airbrushes was sound and they would stand by it. They didn’t, really, as after some years they first started not to send new airbrushes (I got one when I sent my crapped-out one) but refurbished ones (I got two replacements sending again miss-behaving ones, both of which never worked properly, then a note saying something like we don’t do this anymore, bye-bye, here are the instructions on how to operate a airbrush (adding insult to injury). So from new replacements, to refurbished replacements that didn’t really work well, to “sorry, we are out of here; we no longer replace or repair anything, even if it has a “Lifetime” warranty.

I bought and used my first two while I was living in Argentina, where warranty and service were a myth. Then more of them here in the US. My last two, bought new, one with plastic body and another with metal body, had the known issue of sending paint inside the airbrush. I could never discover why. As I bought the last two on evilbay, mayhaps they were not new as claimed, but cleverly made to appear so. The funny thing regarding flooding the body with paint is that they didn’t do it all the time, only occasionally, just to annoy me, intentionally for sure. A change of airbrush solved the issue, so it wasn’t the pressure, the compressor, the paint dilution, or any other external variant.

I have been using them for a long time, painting more than 500 models, I disassemble them, clean them, and reassemble all the components when needed, I have rescued failing ones cannibalizing old ones. I use mainly enamels and lacquers, rarely acrylics.

Lastly I discovered that besides some known issues -or the alignment of the stars, the temperature in Venus or the stock market- there were other ones. 

There is a tiny little part that usually is the first to give up, and since I haven’t seen mentioned it in any of those conversations, here is a heads-up, my humble contribution to the life-long discussion on the Aztek:

One of the main culprits for failing, erratic behavior or non-performance, combined with the dreaded paint blow-back, is a little pin/needle seal that goes inside the black body of the nose (not the nozzle). This little shitty plastic part eventually loses tightness, and its internal diameter (in contact with the pin/needle) becomes so enlarged that the pin just dances the Mambo inside it, providing no real seal. 

 The minute seal is shaped so it can tightly fit between the walls of the nose part, as an insert. The "funnel" part, the little mouth, is the first to be somewhat eroded, perhaps eaten gradually by harsh solvents:

 Small cumulative dried-up residue building up on the pin/needle front and behind (no matter how well you flush the airbrush), contributes to "sand" the shitty plastic bushing as the pin moves back and forth with each use:

The second cause of frustration is already vastly known: the metal rod that goes under the trigger in a furrow and controls the air valve. As the trigger is plastic, the metal rod eventually wears its lodging place and the valve becomes less responsive, and/or has its range reduced.

All this assumes you know what you are doing and have done it for a while and are familiar with the tool, and not that you just have a clogged nozzle and you didn’t realize it, or have no clear idea on how to operate an airbrush or how it works (we have all been there, though). 

One of my metal ones, suffering from the known maladie of flooding the body with paint, from day 1 (as explained, bought on evbilbay as new, but who knows, evilbay is not something to trust blindly, as we have all learned the hard way).

 Why Aztek / Testors chose to do a metal body instead of spending the monies in much more reliable internal metal parts is a mystery. It's said it was done to improve the "feel" of the tool, making it akin professional airbrushes. See, typical vendor maneuver: marketing a product that "looks" and "feels" right, instead of making it right.

Summarizing, when they work, they make my life far easier than dealing with “precision instruments”, when they don’t work, it’s a freaking nightmare, and when they wear down (quite quickly I may add), there is no “Lifetime” warranty anymore and no spare parts for those willing to self-repair/DIY, which is really sad. That Aztek / Testors / Rustoleum will not provide easily fabricated spare parts to replace those that have built-in caducity, is a shame. And a waste of money on part of the consumer, now with a worn-down useless instrument that could have been easily repaired for a few dollars, literally.

An entrepreneur that could fabricate the mentioned pin/needle seal (photographed above), the trigger, the little hose that connects the valve with the nose (I had one cracked), the O ring that seals the connection to the air line, and spare nozzles, could probably have a little business niche, as the previously-mentioned original manufacturers (that have the tools and resources to produce them in quantity and cheaply) seem to give a damn. 

Happy Holidays, everybody!

* So, if you have paint coming into the airbrush body, and the cause is a loose needle running on a worn-out plastic seal (as explained somewhere above) and no other issue, this is a hack: instead of using the gravity paint cup, use the suction one (at the right of the airbrush in the photo below). This eliminated the issue completely in one of my Azteks, no more flooding: