Harbor Freight HVLP Spray Guns Work Pretty Well

I’m in the middle of painting panels for the flood enclosure I’m building for my mill and wanted to pass along a mini-review of the Harbor Freight HVLP spray guns I’ve tried.  I started with them more expensive one they sell, #93305:

Not such good luck with #93305…

To be honest, I didn’t have very good luck with the 93305 model.  Seems like no amount of adjustment would prevent it from working fine for a little while and eventually spattering to much paint out the nozzle which dripped down all over everything.  I followed the instructions, I Googled the heck out of other’s instructions, all to no avail.  This model pressurizes the paint can, and I’m convinced it’s pressure regulator that sits on top of the can was defective in some way and too much pressure was forcing too much paint through the system.  My unit was also older than the one pictured and had a metal gun instead of what looks like blue plastic in that picture.  Steer clear of this model!

A quick order early in the week landed me another model to play with for the weekend.  This was the #94572, which includes two gravity-fed guns (no air regulator malfunction):

These are the droids you’re looking for!

You can get this pair of these little boogers on sale as I write this for $49: cheap!   And they worked great.  While trying to figure out how to adjust the other gun, I came across many more articles about this 2 gun kit than the remote can gun–seems others had already sussed out the better deal.  There were a lot of folks out there using them to paint cars of all things and swearing that they actually worked extremely well for it.  I figured that’d be good enough to paint my plywood panels for the flood enclosure and that was exactly right.  They lay down a lot of paint on the wood without runs and are very easy to use and adjust.  Cleanup is easy, and if I had any tip it would be that they like the paint a little thinner than what I was mixing it at first.  There’s nothing much to adjusting them, fiddle with the knobs a bit, but mine worked great right out of the box.  If not for the long drying time since it’s too cold here for more than 1 coat a day, I’d be long done by now with very nice looking results.

If you’ve got a painting project, you could do a lot worse than to pick up this set of guns.

Related posts:

1. Using Your Mill CAM for Lathe Work?
2. A New John Grimsmo Knifemaking Video with some G-Wizard Tool Deflection Work