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Jason, I love a pressure pot arrangement. However, I'll be the first to admit that they are not really the best choice for small parts done at different times. I have a DeVilbiss 2 qt remote cup, which is the only way to fly with a pressure pot, IMO. The fluid line is 3/8" ID and about 6 ft long so you will loose that amount of paint right off the bat unless you try to save it in some way by manually draining the hose. I don't know why you would bother since you most likely are using catalyzed paint with a limited pot life anyway. The inside bottom of the cup is slightly spherical in shape and the paint tube goes very close to the bottom in the center. If you hold the remote cup fairly upright, there will be very little paint left in the cup when you get all you can out. Some in the hose will drain back if you hold the trigger open with no air flow and the pot cover is removed. The arrangement is more time consuming to clean and uses more solvent in the process. The only practical method for a DIY to clean the fluid hose is to spray solvent through it until it comes clean. If you just like to spend money, I guess you can buy recirculating gun/hose cleaning equipment that can minimize solvent use. I doubt that would be practical unless you used it on almost a daily basis. In any event, I wouldn't concern myself too much with any extra lost paint due to a pressure pot setup. I waste as much if not more w/o a pot by not being able to judge exactly how much paint is going to be needed anyway, even for a few small parts, and I think it is always better to have some left over than run short and have to mix more in the middle just to complete the job. Doing parts individually at different times is always a paint wasting exercise, no matter how you cut it. With a 2 qt remote cup you can cover an entire full-sized car w/o stopping to refill a cup. You have no weight of paint in your gun hand and painting upside down and around wheel wells is a breeze. It's very easy to keep the pattern perpendicular to the surface, even when reaching across a wide hood or roof. You can vary the pot pressure so you can use different fluid tips and air caps to achive relatively large patterns with the same gun (not sure if you can do that with hvlp). I've used as much as a 14" pattern with mine. Really puts the paint down fast that way. You can't percolate the gun to assist cleaning like you can with a gravity feed cup though. I'd only bother with my pot arrangement if I were doing an entire tractor chassis at once; or a car hood or door or something like that that I wanted a larger pattern for. I've found that my gravity-fed spot gun is so easy to clean that I use it for all individual tractor parts, even the hood on my AC-B. If I can cover a part with one coat w/o having to refill the 4 oz cup on my spot gun, I'll likely choose that one and not bother with my full-sized, remote cup arrangement at all. I leave my full-sized gun set up as a remote pot arrangement. There is no benefit for me to set it up as a suction-fed gun, even though it came that way. I'd have to change out the fluid tip and needle and perhaps air cap to do that for a style (suction feed) that I don't particularly care for. Not worth it to bother. For me, it's either my spot gun or my full-sized remote pot, depending on the job at hand. Rod
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