 Hey everybody, it's DJB and welcome to my channel. If you're new here, I'm an airbrushing artist within the model horse community. Everything I've learned about airbrushing has been through my own trial and error, so I'm here to make you some videos to hopefully make your journey a little bit easier. So in this video, I'm going to show you the two different versions of airbrush compressors and how to connect those to your airbrush. So I was running a standard hobbyist compressor I bought off of Amazon. I paid like a little over $100 for it back in the day. It lasted me five years and recently broke, so I purchased the Makita quiet series three gallon shop compressor. It was an upgrade from the hobbyist one and I would highly recommend this. If you're confused about the two types of air compressors, you can watch my other video where I break down the differences and what you would need for your own studio setup. A lot of these smaller hobbyist airbrush compressors that you can purchase off of Amazon are different from the shop compressors like my Makita. So the adapter ports on that machine are larger and universal for those power tools. So there's no reason you can't use the shop compressor to run your airbrush off of. You're just going to need different parts and a bit more of a setup than if you purchase an airbrush compressor that comes with everything already included. So this particular one, I have no idea what brand it is, but it's a generic Amazon air compressor with a tank. It's basically you plug it into the wall, it can fit nicely underneath your painting desk. It's not very loud. It comes with the moisture trap already installed with a pressure gauge and it actually came with an airbrush hose itself. So I can basically plug this in, screw my airbrush hose to it, and spray right away. We'll fill up in about a minute and then it will refill as the air runs out automatically. So there's no manual on off switch. It's all automatic, which is awesome. This came preset up ready to go for my Iwata. And that is because the output on this is a 1 eighth inch BSP. So that is the size of my airbrush hose, my Iwata airbrushes, and then the compressor itself. So it worked really well in that sense. If you're running a different brand of airbrush, you would have to research what thread type is on the bottom of that airbrush and what hose you need to connect to that. But for anything Iwata, it's that 1 eighth BSP. And it must be BSP because that is the certain kind of thread that it is. So I have a male 1 eighth BSP port on my airbrush compressor and my airbrush hose is a 1 eighth BSP female on both sides of it, actually. And then my airbrush would be a 1 eighth BSP male. To set the pressure, you're going to pull up on this little knob and you're going to twist that knob to determine the pressure which will be visible on the gauge. Whatever pressure you set the compressor to, your airbrush is going to actually spray slightly less than that. So when you push on the trigger on your airbrush, the pressure gauge is going to go down. And that's the actual pressure that you're spraying at. So if you're holding the trigger and spraying at full power, whatever the pressure gauge is reading is what PSI you are spraying at. So you're going to need to set the PSI about 5 to 10 PSI higher than what you're actually wanting the output of the airbrush itself. Once you're done airbrushing, it's also very important to drain the reservoir tank. And you can do that on this compressor by pushing in the little button underneath the moisture trap. And it's imperative that we do this after each painting session for the longevity of the tank. For a shop compressor, it's a little more complicated because we are running from those bigger adapters down to the smaller adapters. So how do we go from, you know, this funky thing on the front of the compressor to my airbrush, which is on an airbrush hose. So I found as a general rule of thumb, all of the compressors that I recommend in my other video are all one quarter inch adapter. So the big funky thing on the front of the compressor is a quarter inch quick release. And so basically if you get the male part for that quick release, you're able to connect anything you want into the machine. And the quick connect is great because it makes it so that you can pop tools in and out really quickly. And that's standard across most compressors minus, you know, the hobbyist ones. So these quick connects are common. And on my specific Makita compressor here, I actually have two ports. So I could hook up two airbrushes separately, or if I had two power tools on the go, I could hook them up separately. It's not required. And these are airtight when there's nothing plugged into them. So nothing needs to be plugged into them to turn on the air compressor itself. You're going to need four things. You're going to need a male quick connect to fit into that input on the outside of the compressor. You're going to need a air compressor hose, not airbrush hose, air compressor hose at your desired length. You're going to need a moisture trap and regulator, and you're going to need an air brush hose. So you have to set up the compressor in this manner. And that is because there is no moisture trap on the machine itself. And it is not recommended to put the moisture trap directly on the machine. If it's hot and it's creating moisture and running right next to the moisture trap, that moisture trap is going to fill up really fast. So you want that moisture trap on the end of another hose just to dissipate the water to the maximum capacity because these shop compressors are so powerful, you're not going to be running it at full capacity. It's not going to have as much time to build up water or cause problems in that way as if you were using power tools. But it's just good in the terms of air rushing because we need a higher quality to our work and we just cannot have any water flow coming through the line. If you want to station your compressor further away from your desk, you can have a longer hose and then have a pressure gauge at your desk to read the pressure as you're spraying. This particular piece is what it looks like that you need to insert into the quick release. And all of the parts to standard air compressor are one quarter inch NPT. NPT just is the standard of thread and quarter inch is the size of that. So BSP is more standard in the UK I believe and that's airbrush whereas shop compressors and power air tools are all NPT. So I'm taking this mail quick release with a email quarter inch NPT on the other end of it and then my mail quarter in air hose can screw into that and then the other end of that air hose can screw directly into the moisture trap. So the moisture trap that I ordered on Amazon came with the correct adapter pieces in order to connect an airbrush hose. So you can buy this kind of all one package said and done. Basically it came with two pieces that were mail quarter inch NPT to a mail one eighth inch ESP and these are to insert on either side of the moisture regulator. That would basically mean that I would have two one eighth inch mail BSP ports coming out of but because I only need an airbrush hose coming out of one side I only needed to use that part on one side of the regulator. The regulator itself had an arrow to differentiate which direction the air flow needs to run through it but as a standard all regulators moisture traps have quarter inch female NPT holes on them. I was able to screw in the hose directly into the regulator and then on the other side I was able to use that little piece that it came with that takes the quarter inch hole down to a one eighth BSP and that I can directly screw the airbrush hose to and directly connect to my airbrush. It comes with this handy dandy little holder thing that you can screw into the wall to hold the whole piece up so that you're able to visualize the pressure gauge while working. The pressure gauge goes into the third hole on the front and that will read the pressure as I'm spraying. Now based on the direction of the air flow and where my air compressor is stationed unfortunately that pressure gauge is facing the wrong way so I just stationed a little mirror in here to be able to see the pressure gauge while I'm working. Now for all of these connection points you are going to want to use a seal tape to seal all of the connection. Air at high pressure wants to escape. Anything where there is a connection point or a thread you're going to want to use this seal tape it's super easy to use just cut off a little piece kind of stick it on the thread and then screw in the part and you can use as much or as little as you need to not audibly hear or feel any air coming out of any of those connection points. Not actually sticky it's more just like a plastic that has a static kind of cling to it that you can just easily wrap onto the thread of anything and just make sure that the opening hole where the air is running through is not covered by that tape when you're applying it and you should be able to turn on the compressor and let it sit and not have it run because if it's running at any point it means there's a leak somewhere along the way but I could audibly hear things when I just screwed them together as soon as I added the tape I no longer could audibly hear any of the connection points and then in my airbrush scenario I have a quick release on both of my airbrushes so this is a part that is made by Iwata. It's basically a smaller version of what is on the face of the compressor itself. I'm able to screw on the male part to the airbrush itself and then the female part goes on to the airbrush hose. I'm able to pop on the airbrush and pop it off to switch airbrushes so both of my airbrushes have the male quick release part attached to the bottom of them. I'm able to pop in the singular hose to either of those airbrushes as I'm working and I find that works really well. It allows for just one hose and one connection to everything but I'm able to switch through airbrushes because realistically I'm not going to be using two air brushes at once. You can see too that on the bottom of my micron it came with another moisture trap that it's at the airbrush level and you can certainly do this as well so then I'm able to plug in the compressor and power it on. As the compressor I have two gauges one for the machine itself and one for the tool running. When I turn on the machine and power it on the knob is going to be at zero the output of air pressure is not set. As you turn the dial clockwise it's going to change the gauge to whatever pressure you are looking to use your tool at so that is the same pressure that I should see at my regulator so I've set that at the 65 ish range and when I spray that drops down to 60. So this is a really powerful setup in a way because you're able to really dial in your air pressure and really enhance the experience of airbrushing and for sure the air pressure coming out of this machine is a lot more regulated and consistent than the hobby machine by far. That being said when I'm running this machine it takes about a minute to fill up the whole tank. I can spray for about a minute then the machine will kick in to refill the tank and then I'm able to consistently spray through that time. This machine is only kicking in every five to ten minutes while I'm painting depending on how much air I'm using. Once we're done spraying we're going to make sure that we drain the reservoir tank by turning this little dial located underneath the three gallon tank. On these shop compressors the air is very pressurized so it comes out very fast and if you're not careful it is very loud and it can actually cause injury to your skin so don't release the entire valve in one go do it in little sections and to whatever noise level you can handle being close to it if you have to wear ear protection for sure. And I find that it is being stationed 25 feet away it is not loud when it kicks in as long as I have some other noise happening in the studio so if it's dead quiet in the studio and the machine kicks on I'll admit I jump a little bit it's a little loud. You can still talk to someone in the room while it's on and if you're playing music and having the machine run at the same time I do not hear it kick on it's actually quite quiet in that sense so I love this machine it's been working really well and it's a significant upgrade so I would recommend this route if you have the space the funds and the time to set it all up whereas the hubby's compressor is good it will still work for you but obviously not as consistently so I hope that this helped in your journey I've linked in the description below all of the tools and things that you would need to hook this up if you want to learn more about the makita airbrush compressor you can watch my other video comparing the different kinds. I will also link in the description a PDF on how to set all of that up correctly. Try it out for yourself and let me know how it goes if you have any questions or concerns feel free to send me an email a message or comment down below. I hope this helped in your journey and thank you so much for watching happy airbrushing.