Needle saving. A little home-made trick :)

H

Hurakan

Guest
Hey everyone :)
I want to share something which might be pretty usefull.
As you know, sometimes our airbrushing needles just got to be replaced with a new one, because of a wide variety of problems.
It just sometimes gets old, and as you put it in and out of your airbrush all the time, you may cause a little damage to the tip of your needle (some really really small scratches to be exact). It may cause you to suffer tip drying or freeflowing a little bit more often.

When you work on a project (or projects), and you are getting mad because of this tip dry or freeflow more and more, and you don't have time to waste but you feel you HAVE to change your needle cause it's probbably used much, it's not giving that 100% performance as a "fresh one" does...
So if you have electric eraser in your airbrushing equipment and you have some rubbers for it ( you'll need to sacrifice one, but don't worry it'll last for a very long time :playful: )
It may help you, it doesn't really take much time to do it but you must consider that you may damage your needle even more, if you do it uncarefully!
This WON'T work if your needle tip is broken/screwed !

What you need is:
- Some kind of whitening tooth-paste / polishing liquid with a very very tiny grade (I think it'll do the trick aswell, I wasn't trying it this way though),
- a sponge with this sharp little hairs that I'm going to show you, or some kind of a cloth,
- electric eraser,
- some toilet paper or just a rubber for your electric eraser to hold your needle :)

Whitening tooth-paste got some polishing ability :)
Ok so first what you have to do, is to put a little bit of this whitening tooth paste on your sponge/cloth, just like I did here.
Spread it a bit over your sponge, put it away for now, and grab your electric eraser.
What you have to do, is to make sure that your electric eraser will hold your needle still, so just grab the toilet paper, and twist it around your needle so it will fit and stand still in your eraser. Like I did here: hereerehhereerehe
Or use your rubber for it (just make a hole in it with a little needle [not a AB needle!!] so your airbrushing needle you want to polish will have to sit in there really really tight). Look here.
Just make sure that your needle will hold in eraser tight (needle can move a tiny little bit inside of the eraser, but it musn't get out of it!!!), try to use it now (-Protect your eyes please!-).
Now there is two options... First one is that your needle will probably make a big circles when you use electric eraser, It'll twist like this one here - you don't want it.
You have to make it run stright around itself like this one here (nice and smooth).
So you might have to put your needle out of the eraser with this paper/rubber, and try to replace it a little bit. I'm using only a rubber for it, but when I tried it at first, I was using a toilet paper. It's a little bit harder to do it with paper because you'll have to place it pretty much perfectly. So you'll have to twist it around the needle, put it in - try out - then when it's wrong, repeat the same action.
With a rubber, when you make a hole in it with your needle, you cant switch the place where the hole is pretty much - what I mean is that when the hole is not in the centre (it probably won't be there), your needle will be spining like in the first option... BUT it's lot more easier to stabilize the spining with your fingers!.

Ok so when you're ready, just firstly grab your electric eraser with a needle in it, don't use it yet, just place your needle on the sponge/cloth in a place where is a paste on it, try to help your needle spin nicely around with your fingers, turn on your eraser and polish the tip of the needle (just the tip! you don't want to damage your needle or it point).
Don't use pressure, you can hold the sponge/cloth with two fingers and hold your needle tip inside of it, then just turn eraser on with your other hand and move it nicely a little bit in and out, so you polish just a tip of the needle.
Or you can place your sponge/cloth on a table, hold your electric eraser in one hand, stabilize the needle in the other hand, put it over the sponge/cloth, and then turn the eraser on :)

Usually it takes a few secounds and voila! Your needle is smooth once again :)
I'm doing it like that, I think it's easy to do and it makes my needle work a little bit more, but I don't take any responsibility for you breaking the needle or any of your actions, while following this guide (It's hard to imagine though that someone can damage himself or the needle with this guide, I tried to write it from A to the Z, so everyone can understand what is it about. My first guide like this.) If you don't want to do, you're afraid that you'll do it wrong or that you'll damage your needle - don't do it.
You may give it a try on some old needle that you want to replace.

If it did help, tell me about it :)

I hope you find it usefull :)
Cheers!
 
ThANKS, I might give this a try next time, if I know I will buy a new needle anyway, then it won't matter if I screw up.
 
Back
Top