My Badger is dead, long live Badger

Final post of the day and a sad announcement - my trusty Badger 150 died couple of days ago. Or, if I am to be perfectly honest, I probably 'killed' it myself with my slightly obsessive insistence to keep it very clean. Although I won't swear that this is actually what happened, I probably busted the needle bearing by ramming in the cleaning brush all the way through the length of the airbrush. This action (done repeatedly on several occasions) most probably dislodged or damaged the needle bearing, a small teflon packing ring, presence of which I was happily unaware of. As it turns out, it has a couple of rather important tasks, all of them vital for the airbrush staying in serviceable order.

The first indications of the problem occurred quite a while ago, when I found that paint has spread along the whole length of the needle. This is apparently not supposed to happen, as the needle bearing is supposed to keep the paint from 'wandering' back into the airbrush. So, if you find that your needle is covered in paint, you have a problem.

Happily unawares of the budding problem, I continued to use the airbrush without any noticeable problems until last week when I worked on the interior of the Junkers. The airbrush acted 'funny', but I accounted it to my difficulty with mixing the paint of proper consistency. Once done, I cleaned the airbrush in my usual manner... yes, that's right, the cleaning brush was yet again rammed into the airbrush body. Final flush with water served as undeniable evidence of the fact that the Badger had had it - flow of the spray was interrupted by what I can only describe as a 'hickup' before resuming for a second or two... then another 'hickup' and so on...

Having no idea what was going on, I asked Google for help and after a couple of minutes found Don's Airbrush Tips page. Thank you sir for a very valuable source of information about airbrushes, but even more important for your section about troubleshooting of problems with them. On this page, I found a link to this very informative movie, which described the symptoms I was experiencing to a tee and gave me the most probable cause of the problem. Sorry for not embedding the movie in the post, Blogger refuses to find it in its list of Youtube movies. (????)

The brush is now sent to the shop I purchased it from and getting the blown bearing replaced and work on Junkers had come to a grinding halt. Thinking definitely about a backup airbrush; if you have any comments about about the Iwata Neo? :)