If you ask me, Tom Sawyer had it right: You are better off getting someone else to paint your fence and pay you for the opportunity to do so. Barring that, other options must be explored.

We already had experience with the brush/paint roller method and found it wanting; talk about slow! No, there had to be a better, faster, way to knock out the simple staining/sealing of a cedar plank fence. Normally, I am the one to jump into the fray when it comes to purchasing Gucci laborsaving gizmos around here, not my wife. But she was the one with the burning desire to stain the fence, not me. When she announced that she was on her way to Home Depot to get a paint sprayer, I was a bit stunned, but what the heck … Anything would be better than having to brush bucket after bucket of stain onto a stupid fence under a million degree Mojave sun.

It’s funny -- when she got to Home Depot, she immediately gravitated toward the cheapo sprayers with the little paint reservoirs. Then, suddenly, she had an epiphany!

She told me later that it occurred to her, “What would Scott do?”

She came home with a Wagner Paint Crew Airless Sprayer. What would Scott do indeed! I could not have done better if I had been there myself.

The Wagner Paint Crew is a consumer level spray painter. It consists of an integrated paint hopper that holds two gallons of paint/stain comfortably, a 3/8 hp electric piston pump that delivers around 2800 PSI at the outlet, 25 feet of high-pressure hose, and a spray gun. Assembly is fairly simple: The unit ships mostly assembled – all you have to do is bolt on the handle, hook up the hose and gun, and remove about 90 assorted warning tags, cautions, threats, and other terrors. Let me tell you, this paint sprayer will scare the hell out of you if you bother to read the damned things. My dear wife was so chastened by them all that she refused to operate the Wagner Paint Crew and made me spray the fence all by myself. Smart Gal. There is even a tag on the thing advising plastic surgeons in the correct methods for treatment of injection injuries to the peripheral extremities should the idiot owner shoot himself with the gun.

Translation: This sprayer does not use air to shoot the paint. It pumps a low volume of paint through a very tiny orifice at an incredibly high pressure. If you put your hand in front of this gun and pull the trigger, it will paint your metacarpals that same lovely dark fuschia your wife chose for the patio trim. So don’t put your hand in front of the gun when you are spraying paint unless you want a large, distinctive, tattoo and a big hospital bill.

For a homeowner with a big job to get done, this little sprayer is not a bad choice. Our fence is built with 8-foot long sections of cedar planks, each 6 feet tall. Two 2X4 stringers run between each pole and serve as the attachment points for the planks. The way I attacked the chore of staining the fence was by selecting one 8-foot section at a time. Let me tell you, you cannot believe how fast it went! Turned out that I could knock out one side of a section in just about a minute! This little sprayer (with the stock 0.15 nozzle) put out a perfect pattern for doing this job, too. (BTW, if you are planning on spraying a fence, the best way is to spray it along the grain of the wood, not across -- lesson learned, Grasshopper?)

The biggest headache was keeping the hopper filled with stain and moving the whole apparatus from point to point once the limit of the hose was reached. Still, 25’ of hose goes a long way. If you position the pump/hopper unit properly you can knock out close to 50’ feet of fence before having to pick the whole thing up and move it to the next location.

If you understand basic principles of hydraulics, you will be able to make this thing work with only a casual glance at the directions. If you do not understand these principles, you had better read up careful-like or prepare yourself for pain. The system works like this: You fill the hopper with paint. Gravity forces the paint down into the inlet of the pump, but the pump is a super low volume job not designed to suck in stuff when there is significant resistance on the output side (meaning the hose and gun). So you have to turn a knob directing the output of the pump into very low resistance output circuit that feeds paint back into the hopper. Once the pump is primed, meaning there is no significant air in the inlet side, you switch the knob to the “paint” setting and commence to spraying your fence like a madman. While you are painting, the pump motor works off a pressure demand system. Pull the trigger and the pressure in the hose drops causing the pump to cycle. It will continue to run until you let off on the trigger and pressure in the hose builds back up again. It is in this fashion that the Wagner Paint Crew lets you know that you have run out of paint – the pump motor will not shut off and screams like a spoiled rug rat in the candy aisle.

Each time you run out of paint, you have to refill the hopper and prime the pump again. It’s easy – but not idiot-proof.

Once you are successful in getting paint to come out of the gun, stand by action! I had this thing howling in our backyard. There were points in the staining process where it looked like a Deep Purple concert out there! A dense fog of Behr Fence Stain wafted about the place so thick that my salt ‘n peppa crewcut took on a rich, lustrous, woody, glow! I knocked out that PITA fence in under two hours, no kidding. It is that fast.

Points to ponder:
1. This thing is messy. It is designed to pump gallons of paint over a lot of square footage fast. It’s not for detail work.
2. It is rather clumsy to manipulate at odd angles. The hose is stiffer than the reception line at a Republican fundraiser. An earlier, excellent, review of this device written here on Epinions suggests prospective owners invest in swivel fittings for the gun. I didn’t need them for a simple fence, but if I were going to paint a house, I’d buy ‘em.
3. Most importantly, cleanup on this thing is no picnic. When you are done, you will have 25 feet of hose full of paint or stain, a hopper coated with mung, a gun and spray paint orifice loaded with residue, and about an hour’s worth of cleanup ahead of you. For this reason, plan your work carefully: Make sure you have enough paint on hand to finish the job and try to get it all done in one shot. Don’t do a color change late in the afternoon unless you can finish it before quitting time, and finally, be sure to clean your painter carefully. Nothing is more discouraging than flipping the switch on a plugged-up $200 painting machine nary a squirt of paint will come out of.
4. Lastly, previously mentioned, the Paint Crew will inject your flesh with Dutch Boy if you are not careful.

I was working with a gallon of stain at a time and in retrospect, this was not the best way to go about using the Wagner. As mentioned previously, the hopper will hold 2 gallons. (I wouldn’t want to carry it around with that much paint sloshing around in the hopper, BTW) The next big job I do with it will be with 5-gallon pails of paint/stain. That way I will be able to completely fill the hopper and not have to slow down to open a new can every ten minutes.

Finally, here’s a cautionary tale concerning my experiences cleaning this thing up: Once I had the fence finished, I pulled the gun off and pumped the residual stain back into one of the empty paint pails. I was using a water-soluble stain, so the cleanup called for soapy water. I drug out a bottle of Dawn and pulled my leaky garden hose out to the side yard and commenced to pump soapy water out of the thing. Was I fastidious? Heck no! I was sloshing water all over the place. Then I started to notice something funny: earthworms were coming up out of the ground like crazy and doing gymnastics at my feet. I swear I saw one particularly athletic individual actually jump off the ground and do a pirouette in midair! Hmm, what will make earthworms do that, I wondered?

Then I reached down and flipped off the pump switch …

What I felt was the unmistakable sensation of getting the s%#$ shocked out of me! Yes, the Wagner Paint Crew serves double-duty as both spray painter and earthworm electrocution device if you get it wet. For this reason, I advise caution during cleanup. I finished the job by turning it on and off with an insulated screwdriver, but next time I will be very careful not to slosh any water on the outside of the device.

Other than that, my experience with the Wagner Paint Crew has been excellent – it turned what would likely have been a couple of days of hard work into a couple of hours of fun, topped off by a splendid earthworm circus! Who could ask for more?





Recommended: Yes