You Pay for Advertising...

I'm not one for name brands as a rule. You pay for advertising, as the line from My Cousin, Vinnie goes.



But with spray paint, I've found, you get what you pay for. There are $1 cans of spray paint at Wal-Mart, some no name brand. Krylon is three and a half bucks.



But I tried the cheapie stuff thinking I was saving money, and it takes three coats of it to do what one coat of Krylon does. Krylon coats so well you about have to go next door to make sure your coats are light enough. For real, a whole can of $1 paint doesn't cover as well as 1/4 can of $3 paint. You're not paying for advertising, it turns out, you're paying for paint. Go figure.



Rustoleum is good, too. And Kilz makes few colors but they are extremely well made and they make the most awesome clear coat. Three and a half bucks a can, same as Krylon, but a couple of coats of it and a rocket looks like it's encased in glass. Kilz also has a special nozzle that can be sprayed from awkward angles. From now on, Kilz clear coat is the only clear coat going on Midwest Rock Lobster fleet vehicles. It shames Krylon's clear coats and Krylon makes several.



Things can go wrong no matter the paint. You can get bleeding behind your masks. I tried using stickier masking tape to get around this and it works, except it also peels off the paint you were trying to protect. John Coker's thing works pretty well but not perfectly. After you mask off a rocket, paint it again with the base color. The bleed over will be the base color and will seal itself off. Then when you add the second color, you'll get a cleaner line. I still get some bleeds, but the method works.



Of course, all is for naught if the clear coat melts the colors. I think this happens. Lola had sharper lines before the clear coat, but now she has bleeding in places I'd swear had clean color breaks. She's still cool looking, but when I launch $5 worth of cardboard, plastic and balsa hundreds of feet in the air and probably lose it in a tree even if there are no trees in sight, I want it to have good detail work.



And then there's artifacts like checking. Some paints seem to be worse about this than others, but I could be wrong. Doing lots of light coats will prevent it to a point, but the Grape colored Rustoleum on Lola checked like crazy on the first coat. It just wouldn't go on light enough to avoid it, I guess. Maybe I should have tried going next door and painted it from there.