I hereby declare this thread to no longer be spammed with our marketing announcements.
Most of Astro's tools come from Taiwan. They have a person on station in Taiwan who looks over the local offerings of the major tool makers there and if he sees something he likes then Astro makes a deal with them to put their branding on it and introduces it to the American market. Astro, does not have Astro factories and very few tool marketers do. They pick and chose from what's available from the Taiwanese tool factories, rebrand it and import it.
Denny, my man. Our phone calls should be more common cuz you sound out of the loop. You may be familiar with how we source a few of our products, which would be inline with the above - but that in no way applies to all of our tools.
- There are factories with Astro on the deed
- Our highest selling item is made in the US 10mins from our headquarters
- There are factories that only make Astro items for the US market
- We own multi-national patents, molds, machinery, and have exclusives on dozens of tools.
- There's no "guy in Taiwan looking for tools." We own a company in Taiwan and pay/staff Astro offices there that allow us to keep the up to date on the latest, but our CEO and I both travel overseas often to do the same.
- I'm constantly (as in every week of the year) developing, designing, and prototyping with engineers on brand new tool designs as well as improving staples in our line.
It's not uncommon that one of the "big 4" will come to us with just an idea. Or I come up with an idea and 1-2 years later you see it under the "big 4."
If none of the above was true, there would be literally nothing for me or my department to do here.
Rich STAR Precision Industries in Taiwan is the manufacturer of Astro's spray guns and they are perhaps the best spray gun manufacturer in Taiwan. Astro has greatly reduced the number of spray gun offerings it is currently selling from what they use to. My latest distributor price sheet shows very few offerings still being available. The EuroPro series of RP and HVLP are very good. They no longer are selling the EuroPro Mini Gun which was fantastic.
For business reasons Astro has backed away from the spray gun market simply due to insufficient sales. That stated what they sold is and was without a doubt as good of a spray gun as you could get for the money. They ain't SATA, Iwata or DeVilbiss (and I mean DeVilbiss' good stuff not the Startingline **** which Astro is superior to) but you can, and I have, painted a car with them and it came out fine. As good as I could do with my SATA or Iwata guns: not quite. But pretty damn good. For primer guns they can't be beat.
The only dog spray gun they sell is the EVO4014 which is an Iwata LPH400LV copy and it ***** as was documented by THE GUNMAN on YouTube. They state that you should run this gun at 29 PSIG and it simply can't atomize at that pressure. It needs 40 PSIG with the trigger pulled which is how you set the air pressure on a spray gun. The EuroPro's used at 29 PSIG work fine. In fact, for the RP version that might even be a little high.
As for the 4014, have you tried the EVOT13 and 14? More of an extra low pressure LVLP series if that's the goal.
I know how much of a gun nerd you are
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Chris
Product Manager
