C
Cinder
Guest
You sound sooo frustrated, I feel your pain....if you haven't contacted the company yet you might want to consider trying, they might be able to help you out. Just a thought!
S
swankfive
Guest
I'm a new member, and I've been away from ABing for about 20 years now, but I do have experience in other areas that I feel apply.
Please don't take this as an insult - it's not my intention - but...because of my job, I had to step up my photography game from a pretty casual part-time photographer shooting for fun or taking a limited number of product shots to managing a full studio shooting product, models and celebrities. Because of this, I stepped up my personal equipment bag quite a bit.
There's an old adage in photography that you spend your money on glass first, then you worry about the camera body. I owned an upper-end body already, so I jumped into my first pro-lens after a lot of hand wringing and research. I found a forum where I could see photos and get people's feedback and everyone loved this particular lens, and every image summed up what I was looking for - right price range, focal length, f-stop range, contrast, shadow/highlight depth - and so on.
First week on my camera was pretty great - but I was goofing off and doing what I wanted to do, so there was no pressure. When I put it to work and really started to test it's range - hated it. I couldn't believe that I'd spent money on this stupid thing. Crap lens, crap images, crap all the way around. I was unhappy. I could consistently get good images from my low-end, $100 kit lens. I couldn't get the new high-end lens to consistently do anything. (Sound familiar?) But I worked with it, and I read more, and I worked to figure out what was going on. Now it's my go-to lens. I could get good images with the cheap lens because it was a beginner set up. It's not as sharp, the contrast isn't as strong. It's simplified in a way that it helps build confidence in a beginner. A pro lens is like a race car. You have to know it's every in and out, it's every weakness, it's every quirk and tipping point. It takes time and patience (something I'm thin on) and work, but once you get it down, you start seeing returns. (funny thing is, I bought my second pro lens and expected it to be more like my first one...not so much. Had to start all over again...yet another learning curve...)
There might be something wrong with your brush - for sure. I'm starting to learn again on a Paasche VJR - an old one that I've salvaged from spare parts and throw-aways. Back in the day I had a Badger 150 (stolen) and it never missed a beat - but I didn't have to pay attention to it. It was an appliance. My VJR - not an appliance at all. It's a Ferrari. I like working with it because it's teaching me patience. It's slowing me down. It's forcing me to get my techniques down right. I have to change, I have to grow. It's a lot more work but I'm okay with that. Paasches are notoriously touchy, but the payoff is usually pretty high. This may not be your style - so keep that in mind too.
Good luck.
R
rick
Guest
Ive been airbrushing for 2 years now, 1 year using a chinese garbage clone, but it learnt me airbrushing, if would have used my iawata since the start id still do crap when i begun, u just have to learn to use it, I'm small on budget, but id love to add a vl to my set up.
My point is that ur just going to have to learn, a high dollar gun wont make u better or improve without learning, the vl is a perfect gun off high quality, it like pinstriping, 1000 practise strokea before u can pull decent stuff, 1000s of lines daggers dot before u can do good.
If airbrushing was easy everyone would do it.
My point is that ur just going to have to learn, a high dollar gun wont make u better or improve without learning, the vl is a perfect gun off high quality, it like pinstriping, 1000 practise strokea before u can pull decent stuff, 1000s of lines daggers dot before u can do good.
If airbrushing was easy everyone would do it.
B
BUGSYMONTANA
Guest
the tip is split and the needle is bent dam daaaam daaaaayummm!!! looked it over with a magnifying glass....big as day
gonna order the parts offline and sell it... its just to bulky to me after using my harbor freight airbrush....the paasche 3 has 2 other needles and tips in the kit i brought but i dont even wanna be bothered with it imma sell it and buy a badger krome
R
rick
Guest
Ur selling ur paasche vl? How much?
B
BUGSYMONTANA
Guest
75+ shipping
ignis
Needle-chuck Ninja
I've written this before in this forum and through personal experience and hearing other people who owned older generation Paasche airbrushes, the old Paasches are excellent, but the new generation is crap. The VJR and V#1 used to be among the best guns to do detailed work, but the new generation V#1 I recently bought was not good at all (the paint cup's stub was too long and blocked the needle and the air cap / nozzle / needle rocker parts were not aligned). The new V series also do not have the useful adjusting wheel in front of the trigger anymore (for some obscure reason), they are lighter than the old types and spray worse. Paasches new factory made 'polished' needles are quite rough when you look at them under a magnifying glass or microscope and will not improve spraying a lot (which they should). If you want to buy a good Paasche, buy one from at least before the turn of the century.
Working slow and accurate is something I like as well; it brings out your best where handling skills are concerned. Commercial artists usually hate working at a low pace, but I can always instantly tell if an airbrush is sprayed in one or two passes (layers) or in many that were cautiously applied, just by looking at the work.
S
swankfive
Guest
I remember reading your comments - I don't have any experience with the new stuff. I am going out today to try to buy a new head/tip setup for mine as the smaller size is damaged - is the poor quality manufacturing effecting general parts as well? hope not - the needle I have is bent like you would not believe!
I have the VJR - I got it in 1993 maybe? it was older and was supposed to go back to the factory (friend of mine worked at an art supply store) - I knew what the problem was, offered to fix it and instead he just gave me a great deal on it. I also have an H that I bought in '99 or so and it's solid too. I needed a 'blunt instrument' brush for painting large areas with heavier paint - and it's exceptionally good.
It's a real shame that the quality has slipped that much...I'd love to eventually work my way up to an AB turbo...
ignis
Needle-chuck Ninja
I remember reading your comments - I don't have any experience with the new stuff. I am going out today to try to buy a new head/tip setup for mine as the smaller size is damaged - is the poor quality manufacturing effecting general parts as well? hope not - the needle I have is bent like you would not believe!
I have the VJR - I got it in 1993 maybe? it was older and was supposed to go back to the factory (friend of mine worked at an art supply store) - I knew what the problem was, offered to fix it and instead he just gave me a great deal on it. I also have an H that I bought in '99 or so and it's solid too. I needed a 'blunt instrument' brush for painting large areas with heavier paint - and it's exceptionally good.
It's a real shame that the quality has slipped that much...I'd love to eventually work my way up to an AB turbo...
I am afraid the quality of general parts has dropped too. I still have spare needles for the V-series from decades ago and they are of a better material than the current ones. And with regard to the factory polished needles, anyone prepared t spend a small amount of time polishing standard needles can do a better job (using sand paper grid 1200, 2000 and 3000). The Turbo (the ones from the old generation, I am not familiar with the current models) is an excellent tool, but it requires a lot of fiddling and logical thinking to tune it properly. It is suited to spray fine lines, dots and controlled spattering, but it is of no use to spray larger areas - the amount of paint it is capable of spraying and the modest volume of the paint cup puts a limit on this type of use. If you want to get a more versatile airbrush for approximately the same amount of money I would go for the Iwata Custom airbrushes. They spray (almost) as fine lines as the Turbo and are also capable of spraying larger areas, plus it is less picky with regard to the paints it can process (the Turbo only likes finely pigmented paints). But if you're a fine detail maniac like me and don't worry too much about how much time it will take to complete a painting, you will love the Turbo once you figured out how to adjust it properly.
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swankfive
Guest
I couldn't find the parts anywhere - the writing is kind of on the wall for Paasche. Everything out there is Iwata...I'm going to push this vjr as hard as I can and see where it gets me. once I get it's particulars down, i feel like it's size/performance is about what I need for most work (being that it's going to be used as a compliment to brush work mostly, not the lead in the illustration work.) The AB turbos is one of those things I've always wanted - like the Nikon F3HP - top of the line 30+ years ago, obscure and sexy.
.
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Sprzout
Guest
I'm going to see how the Master G44 trigger works for me once I get it...So far, the issues I'm having with my Paasche VL have been the feel of a stiff trigger and what feels like a "full on/full off" action on pulling back the trigger.
MeeshellMP
Goddess Queen of carts
Wow...Im so tired, I just realized the original dates,and thought Sea Monkey was back lmao!!!
Yup... me too...
Pretty similar to my own experiences (oldness of the thread notwithstanding). My first AB was a mid-nineties era VL, and I kind of hated it too. It worked in a basic sense, but it was a pig to clean (the feed tube had areas where flushing would not touch, so I always had to do a manual scrub-out between colors), and I could never get non-gritty atomization or lines smaller than a crayon with it, regardless of setup. Whatever they were making needles out of back then was SUPER fragile as well. Those things would bend if you so much as breathed on them, and that made cleaning stressful on top of a general pain.
Hated it so much I eventually bought a model H to make things simpler, only to find the H shared many of the VL's faults (resistance to flush cleaning, chunky atomization, inability do to lines finer than a crayon).
Fast forward to 2012 or so, and I try to buy a Talon. Had to return it twice because of defects worse than what you'd see on the Chinese brushes (incomplete plating, cup-to-body welds that were crooked, gapped, and spattery, and much more!). After the second return I decided it wasn't worth it.
A year later I got an Eclipse, and it was the the brush I should have been using all along. Stuff I had to wrestle with the VL to even try to do, the Eclipse did with no effort right out of the box. Night and day difference. Fifteen years wrestling with the VL, and the Eclipse kicked it's ass in one day.
There's a lot of people who try to play apologist for bad tools by saying you can learn to use them if you just stick it out. I feel this is meaningless. Sticking it out is a waste of time and energy if all you're doing is compensating for the tool being rubbish when there are tools you could have bought that'll "just work". You'll learn just as well for a good tool as from a bad tool, the bad tool will just make you jump through more hoops for longer. And in fact, if there's things the bad tool just flat out can't physically do, then you will have more to learn from the good tool.
"Brush X is difficult, but if you stick it out, it can do things other brushes can't" = good reason to stick with a difficult brush. This is the side-feed SOTAR (compared to the Eclipse). This is also Swakfive's camera lens.
"Brush X is difficult, but if you stick it out, you can make it work as well as other brushes" = brush is lesser quality, and you're probably indulging in sunk cost justification by propping it up. This is some of the better Chinese cheapies.
"Brush X is difficult, but if you stick it out, you can do just enough of what other brushes can do to get by" = brush is crap. This is the VL, the H, and the worse Chinese cheapies.
Also there's this weird thing people will sometimes do where if they manage to make a bad tool work, they think that means it's a good tool. As if it' a binary thing rather than a spectrum. Saying you spent X amount of extra time making tool A do what tool B does right out of the box does not redeem tool A. It just means you were personally okay with wasting your time with it. Saying tool A can do the same jobs as tool B if you put in the extra time, when you don't have to with tool B, doesn't make tool A as good as tool B. The only reason the latter would be any kind of justifiable is if the price of tool B is greater than the price of tool A by a margin exceeding the value of the time you spent making tool A work at tool B's level.
My VL requires more work/fuss for less capability than my Eclipse or my SOTAR. There are things it physically cannot do which they can, and the things it can do, it either does worse, or with more fuss, or both. It is, by any objective measure, a worse brush.
Hated it so much I eventually bought a model H to make things simpler, only to find the H shared many of the VL's faults (resistance to flush cleaning, chunky atomization, inability do to lines finer than a crayon).
Fast forward to 2012 or so, and I try to buy a Talon. Had to return it twice because of defects worse than what you'd see on the Chinese brushes (incomplete plating, cup-to-body welds that were crooked, gapped, and spattery, and much more!). After the second return I decided it wasn't worth it.
A year later I got an Eclipse, and it was the the brush I should have been using all along. Stuff I had to wrestle with the VL to even try to do, the Eclipse did with no effort right out of the box. Night and day difference. Fifteen years wrestling with the VL, and the Eclipse kicked it's ass in one day.
There's a lot of people who try to play apologist for bad tools by saying you can learn to use them if you just stick it out. I feel this is meaningless. Sticking it out is a waste of time and energy if all you're doing is compensating for the tool being rubbish when there are tools you could have bought that'll "just work". You'll learn just as well for a good tool as from a bad tool, the bad tool will just make you jump through more hoops for longer. And in fact, if there's things the bad tool just flat out can't physically do, then you will have more to learn from the good tool.
"Brush X is difficult, but if you stick it out, it can do things other brushes can't" = good reason to stick with a difficult brush. This is the side-feed SOTAR (compared to the Eclipse). This is also Swakfive's camera lens.
"Brush X is difficult, but if you stick it out, you can make it work as well as other brushes" = brush is lesser quality, and you're probably indulging in sunk cost justification by propping it up. This is some of the better Chinese cheapies.
"Brush X is difficult, but if you stick it out, you can do just enough of what other brushes can do to get by" = brush is crap. This is the VL, the H, and the worse Chinese cheapies.
Also there's this weird thing people will sometimes do where if they manage to make a bad tool work, they think that means it's a good tool. As if it' a binary thing rather than a spectrum. Saying you spent X amount of extra time making tool A do what tool B does right out of the box does not redeem tool A. It just means you were personally okay with wasting your time with it. Saying tool A can do the same jobs as tool B if you put in the extra time, when you don't have to with tool B, doesn't make tool A as good as tool B. The only reason the latter would be any kind of justifiable is if the price of tool B is greater than the price of tool A by a margin exceeding the value of the time you spent making tool A work at tool B's level.
My VL requires more work/fuss for less capability than my Eclipse or my SOTAR. There are things it physically cannot do which they can, and the things it can do, it either does worse, or with more fuss, or both. It is, by any objective measure, a worse brush.
S
Sprzout
Guest
I'm keeping my VL only to do large base coat paint layers. It's essentially a spare brush for me to use for different colors or a clear coat...For that, I'll keep it around.
But you're right, I've experienced many of the problems you're describing so far - and I've not tried my SOTAR 20/20 yet.
But you're right, I've experienced many of the problems you're describing so far - and I've not tried my SOTAR 20/20 yet.
