I have heard various comment’s over the years regarding pasting machines such as, they are too much agro, to expensive, there messy, and are they any good.
Well I can only tell you of my experience with the one I have.
Back in 1997 I had a large contract with lots of paperhanging to do, and was in the decorators merchants where they had a top of the range beeline pasting machine.
I asked the manager behind the counter how much it was, he said that they are £300.00 normally but this one has slight shop damage to it, so make me an offer. The damage was very minimal all that was wrong with it was the two plastic adjustment controls were broken, so it meant I had to use the brass control behind the plastic and have no numeric info on my controls, which really was no big deal.
So I offered him £ 100.00 and he said OK, so I said, but I want a new spatula as well, and he said ok, so I am on a roll now, and said you might as well throw in one of them aprons, which he agreed to do.
So I walked out with £315.00 of goods for £100.00 and felt quite good about things as I saved my self £215.00.
The next day I went in to work and set my pasting table up with my new pasting machine on top of the table and was given some funny looks by the other decorators as none of them had ever seen a pasting machine and only one of them had ever heard about them.
I was asked how much that cost, does it work, and is it any good.
Well prior to me using this machine I was hanging 12 rolls of paper a day at a rate of £10.00 per roll and earning myself £120.00 a day as were most of the other decorators.
The paper I was hanging was a washable plain, no match contract paper so I fed the whole roll through the machine and folded it concertina fashion, and then another Roll and allowed to soak. Well that took me less than 2minutes to have enough paper pasted to hang 8 drops, which I new put me on a winner. I then put the first roll on top of one of my tool boxes witch stands 2 ft of the ground and just pull the paper up the wall, spatula the paper on, trim off the bottom then move the tool box along and repeat.
At the end of the day I had no back ache like I usually did through leaning over the table, as with this machine you just pull the paper through with a straight back, or may be it was the fact that I had hung 22 rolls of paper and earned a extra £100.00 more than I did the day before.
The only problem I had with it to start with was, the paper veering off to one side of machine and then not applying adhesive to that side of the paper, but after using for a little while I got the hang of applying more tension to the opposite side of the roll to bring the paper back central again.
As well as being extremely fast and curing my bad back, it was very clean to use and a joy to work with. Even at £300.00 it was worth its weight in gold.
I still have my machine and use it from time to time and would advise anyone who is thinking of buying one to buy one.

Hope you find my painting tips helpful,
Steve @ interior paint decorating