Product Review: IronBow Paint Rack

Last week or the week before, I was cruising 40K blogs. I like to hop from blogroll to blogroll based on folks' post titles. If they interest me, I read them. After several hops, I found a post talking about 40K and wargaming items on Etsy. One example of a good item was a paint rack, laser cut from MDF, and made by TheIronBow. You can find it here.
I'd never ordered from Etsy, but as it's a well-established site now, I figured I'd give it a shot. The price was very reasonable, as was shipping. I was in for $27, which is still only about half of what some other companies charge for comparable racks.

Shipping was prompt, so I had the rack in hand in nine days, including the day I ordered it. Perfectly acceptable. I was pleasantly surprised that it arrived in a cardboard box, instead of the padded flat mailer I was expecting.

I cracked open the box and found all of the parts neatly stacked, with a styrofoam spacer to keep them from rattling around. Nice! Also in the box was a bag containing the hardware (screws and nuts, and some rubber pad feet) and the invoice. The seller added a handwritten note with tips for proper assembly.

 

 

 

The pieces are all made nice, sturdy hardboard. None of that plywood or chipboard.

Everything slots together using the tabs. It's pretty idiot-proof, but I do recommend you slot both of the bottle holder sections into one side, then do the other side, then top, then bottom. I tried assembling it all around the back panel, then putting the front in, but it was hard to keep all the tabs in the slots that way.

Once you get it slotted together, you put the bolts through the little holes, and thread them into the provided nuts that sit in a little cross slot. I'd never seen a system like that before, but it works quite well. I would get all the bolts in to finger tight, then use a screwdriver to snug them up.

However, I got a little overzealous with the first bolt, and started cranking down on it with the screwdriver. Metal versus wood means metal wins, and I started pulling the nut straight through the wood. Oops!

 

 

I just backed the bolt out a tad, squeezed the wood back flat and all was well. Lesson learned, and the rack was assembled.

I grabbed a bottle of Reaper Master Series and slotted it in. Perfect fit. The bottles sit at a slight upward angle, leading the paint to flow down toward the nozzle. I've read online that this helps keeps dropper bottles from clogging up. We'll see if that's true.

You can see the slight angle here (as well as the proper fit of the bolts):

 

 

I filled the rest of the rack with paint bottles. I went from this storage solution (a craft box crammed with paint):

 

 

To this one:



One of the neat things about the rack is that when it's filled, you can pick it up and shake it around and the bottles don't move at all. I found that the only way to get bottles to pop out was to give it a little wrist flip, like you were flipping pancakes. Not a motion you'll replicate often.
I sat down and started painting to see how the rack interacted with my workspace. I found that the rack works quite nicely, but that the necks of the bottles kept sticking on the way out. But after about 45 minutes of painting and color switching, I had figured out how to remove the bottles without snagging the necks.

Some folks may not like the fact that you cannot see all of the labels on the bottles when they're stored, and that's a valid concern for many painters. However, I tend to paint using a limited palette of main colors, and a few peripheral colors. You can see in the shot above that I have my Ultramarine armor colors in the upper right, golds under those, then greens, browns, and white/grey/black. I just pull paints from top to bottom as I progress through my routine. If you use the same colors over and over, say for painting an entire army, this rack works just fine. If you're a constant color-switcher or experimenter, you might find the storage orientation frustrating.

Overall, I'd give the rack a solid A, and plan to pick up another one in a few weeks to hold the rest of my paints that didn't fit (I own a ton of paint).