Eclipse HP-BCS
Written by Adam Rice   
Wednesday, 06 February 2008

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Straight from the Iwata-Medea website comes the Eclipse HP-BCS.  A siphon fed, dual action, internal mix airbrush.

 A couple of disclosures here. 

  1. I used to work for Iwata
  2. The joy of not working directly for them means I can say whatever I want.
  3. On the other hand I still do some writing for them.
  4. I've never used another brand, so I'll refrain from brand to brand comparisons.

Of all of Iwata's airbrushes the Eclipse is, by far, one of their top sellers.  And there's some excellent reasons why.

  1. It's forgiving of user errors.  Specifically, it's very forgiving of paint consistency mistakes.
  2. It's got the ability to do most of the fine details you need to get most jobs done.
  3. The background spray pattern is reasonably large.  Now, it ain't a spraygun but you can get somedecently sized patterns out of it.
  4. It cleans up easily. No airbrush is really easy, but the self-centring nozzle just falls out.  Sweet!
  5. Replacement parts are inexpensive.  Nothing Iwata makes is cheap, so don't expect the parts to go for a song, but compared to the other airbrush lines Eclipse airbrush partsare not hard on your wallet.

I've recommended Eclipse airbrushes to beginers and pros alike without any guilt, because these airbrushes are in the butter zone of workhorse airbrushes.

Now on to the specifics of an HP-BCS.

It's siphon-fed.  This means it's great for uses where you want to spray a lot of paint.  i.e. T-Shirt painting, spraying backgrounds.  A lot of people get introduced to airbrushing and choose a siphon-fed model becausethey can range roughly $20 less than a gravity or side-fed configuration.  Don't be fooled by the discount.  Bottles still cost something and siphon-fed airbrushes love a lot of bottles!  In fact my equation is however many colors you have plus one for the cleaning solution.

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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 06 February 2008 )