Posted from Madhouse Miniatures

Krylon is what happens when a model builder looks at Rust-Oleum and says, “I want something that dries faster and with a name that doesn't sound as old timey.”

Rust-Oleum. Sounds like something that's been around since the 1920s. Because it has been around since the 1920s.

Krylon. Sounds modern. Futuristic, even. Space age. Sounds kinda like Superman's home planet.

It’s the thinking man’s Rust-Oleum. The paint for the intellectual who understands that a 1:25-scale hood requires approximately one teaspoon of paint, then deliberately attacks it with a spray can designed for an inexperienced Karen to repaint a patio set.

Rust-Oleum is for the guy who paints a lawn chair directly over bird excrement. Krylon is for the sophisticated gentleman who wipes the bird poop off first and then ruins a model car body with the rest.

Krylon users always have a system. Warm the can in water. Shake it for exactly nine minutes. Stand twelve inches away. Apply three microscopic mist coats. Wait until Jupiter enters Capricorn. Then watch the paint craze the plastic anyway because the paint, plastic, humidity, barometric pressure, and ancestral spirits were apparently incompatible.

But when it works, Krylon users become unbearable. Suddenly they aren’t model builders anymore. They’re coatings engineers.

“You just have to decant it.”

No, I do not. I bought a spray can specifically because I did not want to decant anything. That is like buying canned soup, dumping it out and separating all the ingredients, then recombining them before heating. Who does that?

Krylon’s greatest strength is that it dries quickly enough for you to realize you messed up before bedtime. Rust-Oleum leaves the model tacky fifty years after you're dead. Krylon gets straight to the point. Within ten minutes, you can clearly see every mold line and sanding scratch you tried to bury under six coats of Gloss Banner Red.

And the nozzles are excellent. They provide a smooth, powerful, even spray pattern suitable for mailboxes, bicycles, steel shelving, agricultural equipment, while instantly filling every panel line on a 1966 Nova.

Still, Krylon does have one important advantage over hobby paint: it costs less per ounce. Of course, nobody needs twelve ounces of paint for one model car. But how else is a man to add half empty paint cans to the ever growing shrine to fire code violations in the corner of the garage?

Krylon truly is the thinking man’s Rust-Oleum.

Unfortunately, the thinking man is still standing in the hardware aisle holding a can of lawn chair paint and thinking about whether it will melt an AMT body.

7.5 Ghost Lines out of 10