Painting equipment

[Walnut Beast]

Here is a good explanation. The problem is you are asking definitive questions about spray guns that will in reality make no usable sense to you until you actually spray paint with a good quality gun. As someone else already told you -- the main difference between a cheap $30 gun and an expensive $350 to $600 gun is atomization (the ability of the gun to break up the paint into fine droplets as it comes out of the gun). The cheap paint gun you bought will in most cases work good for primer, lacquer, oil based paints (like for painting furniture) and it should handle acrylic enamel decently. But I can speak with experience of many years painting in that the cheap spray gun will NOT do a good job of spraying acrylic urethane in single stage or clearcoat. The cheap guns are older gun designs that were not designed to correctly spray acrylic urethane topcoat paints. What you can expect with a cheap spray gun spraying acrylic urethane single stage or clearcoat is excessive orange peel and/or runs in the paint (usually both in the same paint job). Which all goes back to that single word - ATOMIZATION. Cheap spray guns work fine in my book for spraying primer but don't expect to cheat the hangman by buying a cheap spray gun and expect to get a show winning paintjob straight out of the gun. 

[Don P]

Ahh, I've been trying to paint the truck with a drywall texture gun, AKA the booger flinger  :D.

[Walnut Beast]

With some serious elbow work you can wet sand all the way down to 2000 grit and buff out to a glass finish 😂😂

[Walnut Beast]

Heck you could spray and get a decent finish with a Graco airless sprayer. Maybe that's what I should have used when I painted a Kenworth with 550 bucks a gallon just for the color years ago 😂

[Old Greenhorn]

Doc, I did sand it down and tried again, same results. The finest paper I could get was 400.

FPP, I may have had the same problem and never knew it.

 Barbender, I did not. The next accident I had was at least 25 years later, then another 10 years after that. Just to be clear, neither of those totals was my fault. In the first I was on a main road and a fella pulled out of a side street to make a left across the front of me, he saw me too late, we made eye contact. I thought he would stop and I swerved to go around his front end, instead he sped up and I opened a seem on the side of his car from the front of the drivers door to the rear bumper. He got a 'failure to yield' ticket. The second was on a Parkway, 55 mph bumper to bumper traffic and the lady in front of me slammed on her brakes when a bird flew low across the front of her car. I pushed her electric tailgate right up against the back seat on that station wagon.
 Those last two accidents I had was another "slam on the brakes' in front of me to make a turn they nearly missed, and the last when I was stopped waiting for a guy to make a left turn and I was rear ended by a new driver that was not watching the road and just drove right into me. My son got rear ended in the same spot and the same situation, but he had a 10,000# warn winch in the rear receiver and was hit by a brand new Mercedes sport coupe, which mostly drove under his truck but took quite a hit from that winch. The Mercedes was totaled, the truck was fixed in a week or so. Bang and bend. It's a work truck.