Tuesday Tool Time - The FrankenPipe

Most of you that do any airbrushing probably have a nice, sophisticated setup. At least, you have a small, quiet compressor that's a joy to operate and maintains family harmony.

Or maybe you're like me. I have a compressor that I lovingly refer to at The Beast.

Yup, that's a full-sized compressor that I bought a while back to power my air nailer and some other accessories. Nowadays, I don't use the air tools all that much - and I needed a compressor for my airbrush - so I took the cheap thrifty route, figuring I could just use what I already had on-hand.

But going from a large compressor like this down to an airbrush, with its teeny-tiny airbrush hose, required a bit of creativity...

Introducing: the FrankenPipe. Yup - that there's eight (count'em - 8!) different fittings, plus moisture trap and gauge, all connected together with some thread tape and wishful thinking.

The idea was to bring the full-size hose into the paint room and - through a series of different fittings - create a moisture trap/gauge cluster that could be easily and quickly disconnected. Same on the airbrush hose end - but that also required some converting from the small hose to the full-size fittings.

What resulted might not look all that elegant, but it allows me to maintain a lot of flexibility - including adding more standard size hose to extend the reach of my airbrush into (most parts of) the layout room.

I think it actually looks pretty cool. Heh - but sound - well, that's another issue. Let's just say more than a friend or two has jumped out of their skin when The Beast decides to kick in and they're not expecting it!

Oh - and forget about late-night and early morning paint sessions. Ask me how I know . . .