Better Than Paint Adhesive Film

Reviewed by Al Superczynski

'Better Than Paint' is a thin adhesive film available in an expanding variety of colors. It's ideal for quickly creating large areas of color or graphics and perfect for masking clear canopies on aircraft or windows on cars. I haven't tried it as a masking agent on painted surfaces but suspect it has too much tack for that application.

I had an old tool AMT '57 Chevy with a 'tiger-striped' roof that needed to be redone and decided it would be a perfect test for this new product. I covered the defective paint with BTP's #110 Off-White and found that it did a more than adequate job for a shelf model. Unfortunately BTP is a bit thicker than metal foil so although it should work well for graphics, as shown on their website, it may be objectionable for a contest-quality model if used to replicate graphics that were painted on the real car. On the other hand, many cars had/have self-adhesive graphics and BTP would duplicate this just about perfectly in scale.

It took me two tries to get the roof finished on my Chevy and I learned a lot from the effort. First, even though I've pointed out that the film is thicker than foil it's still thin enough to show any specks of dust, lint, or cat hair (!) so be sure the surface to be covered is as clean as it would have to be for a good painted finish. Second, this stuff stretches, and it stretches well! It can't be 'worked' like foil as it marks easily, meaning wrinkles can't be 'pushed' ahead as with foil, but if you leave enough excess material to hold onto it can be stretched over gentle compound curves - it just takes a little practice to get the hang of it so I'd definitely recommend getting at least a couple of the sample sizes to work with before committing to the real thing.

At $9.99 for two 5 3/4" X 8 1/2" solid color sheets ($10.99 for metallics) plus a modest shipping charge BTP provides decent value for the money and undoubtedly has applications I haven't even thought of as yet. As an added bonus customers are getting free trial-size sheets of each color for a limited time. Highly recommended!

BTP is available in Polar White, Off-white, Solid Black, and Silver Metallic so far, with more colors to come. Thanks to Roger Sales of Better Than Paint for the review samples.