I have a small cabinet shop. it's a one man operation for the most part, which suits me. In the never ending quest for ways to produce quality stuff quickly, I have gone the direction of spraying finishes. I consider myself an amateur with the spray gun, even though I'm on my
3rd one ; ^ ) the first two were HF taiwanese units. I bought HF's high end, which were sata and binks clones respectively. they work fine, are kind of a pain to clean and didn't last very long- but they were cheap. for someone who already is proficient with spraying and is going to spray 3 or 4 jobs a year, I'd think they would be a good choice. for the 3rd gun I purchased a high end unit- the accuspray 19c. it is a step above either of the previous guns in pattern and controllability, a couple of steps over them in how much material it can deliver well, 4 or 5 steps over them in cleanability and 5 times the price. there is one thing about the accuspray that really stands out- support. a couple of times I have had problems with it that I couldn't figure out. with the HF units this sort of thing left me dead in the water. with the accuspray gun, a quick call to tech support has resolved it. in both cases, the solutions were pretty simple (remember, I'm an amateur), so it might not be an indication of their effectiveness in the case of a complex failure. I didn't have to sit on hold, the person who helped me was knowledgeable, courteous, never made me feel like my problem was stupid amateur stuff (which it was) and more to the point, the problems were resolved in a matter of minutes. in both cases, separated by about a year, I spoke with the same guy, James. I get the feeling that he IS their tech support department and that furthermore that is only part of his job. i got the feeling that tech support calls were somewhat unusual.spray guns are deceptively simple machines. they have about 2 moving parts. almost all problems are due to incomplete cleaning. it is the subtle things that set a good one apart- things like stainless steel channels inside the body of the gun, good engineering of the atomization jets....
for me it has been a clear case of buying quality being worthwhile.
Bridger (who had better get his butt out to the shop and finish that spray job)