Given the fact that I like to buy stuff used, since it’s so often the case that it wasn’t actually used much, I end up getting a lot of things I probably wouldn’t otherwise have. The whole radial arm saw thing is one such example. I would never have gone out and bought a new one of those, they cost too much.

So, I ended up with a compact little paint sprayer in a box labeled “Works Fine.” It cost practically nothing and seemed to be well maintained and not very heavily used. Frankly, it had the “I’m very useful” look about it, as things sometimes do. How could I resist that?

And so I waited for an opportunity to try it out.

Unfortunately, the first available opportunity was to prime my new kitchen cabinet. I know this particular little sprayer is made for oil paint, and pretty thinned down oil paint at that, but I thought I might be able to convince it to spray the acrylic primer, if I thinned it with water.

No, that didn’t work.

And it wasn’t a matter of the paint just being wrong. If it was, it would have clogged. No, it made the appropriate sounds for a paint sprayer but did none of the magic tricks. Nothing but air came out of the spray gun. Not a lot of air, either.

So, maybe that should be labeled “Doesn’t Work Fine.”

Determined to not be completely defeated by paint on that day, I broke out my gravity-feed sprayer and ran the required 100 feet of hose from my compressor to the back yard. The compressor is in my basement workshop and, if left up to me, it will never ever leave there.

So, I dumped the paint from defective sprayer #1 into working-last-time-I-checked sprayer. Fingers crossed, don’t want it to become defective sprayer #2. You know, can’t be certain I did a great job cleaning it last time, because, obviously, I was in a hurry then, too. I’m always in a hurry. That’s why I wanted to spray in the first place. Spraying a cabinet takes far less time and effort than using a brush, right?

Well, I was pleased, because the sprayer worked.

Or it did for a while. That one also was made for thinned down oil paint and that so-called acrylic primer seems to be made out of chalk and Elmer’s glue. The sprayer quickly got pretty pathetic.

But, in my growing state of enragement, I continued on. I persevered and the cabinet parts (there were three of them) got nicely primed without the use of a brush. I then cleaned out the working spray gun and put it out of my sight, coiled up the hose, and waited for the paint to dry.

Altogether, it took three and a half hours to prime the three cabinet pieces.

After I sanded that primer a bit, as you have to do or your finish feels like five-o’clock shadow, I used a brush to paint a finished coat on.

That took about an hour. And I had only a brush to wash.

You know what? A brush works fine.