okay... for a
variety of reasons, the summer kind of got away from me. I mean in terms of woodworking, that is.
However, tonight I finally got to try out this thing.
Bear in mind, I've never ever done any spraying, or had any instruction. I have just seen a few people waving these things around, and I watched
Marc Spagnuolo's review of this unit also a couple times.
So tonight I shot a small test piece for my
fishtank stand. It was so easy, I grabbed all my drawer boxes and flipped them upside down to spray, and I also set out the top, and then sprayed them also. There's no point in taking a photo, as no photo I could take would show much after one coat of finish.
Some random thoughts, then:
This thing is really uncomplicated. You fill the cup with finish (I was spraying flecto varathane WB) and clip it on. You turn the front spray selector to choose either veritcal, horizontal, or round. You adjust the knob on the back of the handle to adjust volume. That's really about it.
I set up a piece of cardboard to help estimate how much to spray, which I think is a good idea. So I sprayed the cardboard, adjusted the volume knob, sprayed the cardboard some more, and so on.
The finish on the drawer bottoms came out just fine for a first coat on bare baltic birch. I'd say there is some definite grain raising, but not tons.
The finish on the top (which already had 3 thin coats of rattle-can shellac) came out pretty nice also. The texture is not glass smooth, but I didn't really expect that. I'll probably lightly sand with 320 or 220 grit before the next coat.
I think I should try a slightly thicker coat next time, this was pretty thin. on both items.
Cleaning was no worse than rinsing a brush: dump the leftover finish back into your can, rinse out the cup and wipe it out. Fill it with water and run it through the gun for a bit. Then I took off the front part of the sprayer (air cap, air cap ring, air distributor plate/spring) and made sure they were clean also, and then left it to dry.
There is one rather surprising oddity. Go back to the first post and see the photo... see that handle that you use to carry around the earlex unit? It's not attached! Seriously! It's just friction fit into the top of the unit. I happened to give it a light jerk and it just popped right out. It stays in tight if you just carry it around, but that seems a bit flimsy. Though I admit it makes it a bit easier to fit the unit into a cupboard for storage.
I'll report back some more when I get further on finishing the fishtank stand.