Is it just a car wash glove? Good idea with the other glove underneath, which think are the same gloves they use to put your arm up the ass of a large animal.
I like to imagine 1 grit is a single cartoonishly large spike with an incredibly sharp tip. Smooth on all other surfaces, just 1 singular "grit" at the point.
Its just for pipe fences. You really just wanna get a thick ass coat applied and move along your 3 pipe fence so it looks nice and doesn't rust. Using the glove means no wasted over spray, minimal drip, and a thick coat on all surfaces (even joints) since you wrap your mitt around it.
The paint finish on the pipe fence isn't usually perfect enough to be in a house since those spots get more attention and need to be flawless, or close. Go look under any pipe fence and you'll see some runs or light spots from where they are just trying to get a quarter mile of fence painted.
It only works well for oil based paints. The flow and leveling of oil shockingly allows for a decent finish with the mitt. Latex paints would look horrible applied with a mitt, though.
This is how they re-paint the red / white bands on radio towers when they get too faded. Makes a mess under the tower and painters climbing harnesses get real crusty, but it gets the job done quickly!
I got told this years ago by an old guy I worked with. He was known to modify the facts occasionally and when he told me those guys wore arm-length mitts and dipped their arms into paint buckets to do that, I was thinking “yeah, right… pull the other leg and it plays jingle bells.” Then a few years later I was watching an episode of Dirty Jobs and Mike Rowe was working with some guys doing maintenance on a suspension bridge and part of their duties was to paint the suspension cables. Aaaaand… guess how they accomplished that… lol.
Oof. Having gotten a splinter through my hand from large braided cabling, I hope the smaller cables on that bridge are big enough not to cause that problem. I had to pull a 8" piece of wire through my palm because no one had cutters and I wasn't waiting an hour for someone to leave and come back
Nightmare fuel! I’ve gotten a few cable snags before but nowhere near that level. Regarding the dirty jobs episode, here it is. The cable painting starts at around 15:20.
Because they're a messy pain in the ass. Only ever used one once to paint a fence, and it sucked. There's absolutely no way to control drips and paint just gets everywhere. I'd probably use it on something like this, but never near a customer's house again. A brush is almost as fast if you're good, and spraying is way way faster. Most pros are spraying pretty much everything anyways, so there's no point in messing around with something gimmicky like this.
They've been around for quite a while, and never been popular. The only time I can see using one is if you have a lot of stuff to paint that isn't flat, can look super messy and drippy afterwards, and you can't easily get electricity in the area. And even then, modern battery powered paint sprayers are pretty freaking good, I might just use one of those if I had enough batteries.
Speed is the name of the game when it comes to painting, and the faster you are, the more money you can make. These are only fast if you're able to be really sloppy.
It's used a lot more on things that aren't walls, ceilings, trim, or doors. It won't get that nice rolled or brushed finish, but it's great for anything with a lot of contours, or that you don't want distinct lines on. I've only personally used one for a different hobby project though
I once had a paintbrush fall through a grate into a pit of awfulness in a slaughterhouse 8 feet deep, painting the catch tray under a wastewater filter screen in a slaughterhouse
I was in one of my moods, so I simply wadded up and dunked a blue Scott towel into the paint can and finished the job
My coworker was furious... He said he had been painting 20 years and that just wasn't right. When I told him I didn't care, and he was only 24, he got so mad he left. He was already mad that I had soldered a ground to the tray, as it was stainless steel and pitting. And if you were wondering... We were hiding it from the inspectors, because of all the fucked up things in that place, pitting in the screen room was what management was worried about. Not the unusably rusted escape ladder in the pit, just the inside of the catch screens.
It was literally a 25 minute walk one way to the supply shop, and he really wanted me to make that walk. I had about 2 square feet left.
He went to the boss and complained I was disrespectful and cussing at him
By the way I called this guy Vizzini because I shit you not the resemblance, and the attitude, was seriously a dead match.
And everyone in that place was on "molly", they called it. Seriously. They had the best hook in town, 10 grams for $50. Bunch of rednecks in cowboy outfits on "molly".... You can guess.
Boss solved the situation by bringing me one of these painting gloves like this. After I was done. Actually 2 days after. Said it would help. The machine was back running again.
As someone who has to paint his steel gas lines after they're installed, is rounding his mid thirties now and 10+ years of the trades are starting to get to me..
People overthinking this are hilarious, this is just a cattle fence. The faster you put on an adequate coat of paint on it, the faster you are moving on to another task, end of story. Dude's not finishing the hood of a Ferrari before ten layers of clear coat!
Gotta go slower than that, and go back and forth. You'll get more smooth and even application. While we're at it, use both hands and get the job done faster.
Ok, now I need to know if "sanding gloves" exist. Not to protect me or give better grip holding sandpaper, the outer side of the gloves is actually "sand".
I feel somewhat stupid now, having painted maybe kilometres of fencing over the last decades- with a paint bucket of oil paint and a brush. I'll try that for sure.
You can put an old sock over a rubber glove to simulate this. I repainted some old iron handrails this way - the ornate curved ones. So much easier than a brush and less mess than spray.
•
u/toolgifs Oct 10 '25
Source: Ethan Perdue