I imagine that there are a number of HS owners here that, like me, have seen the videos posted on YouTube and at Home Depot’s website promoting the new Rustoleum Neverwet product. As I understand it, the actual chemical formula has been around a couple of years, but it took a while for the small team that created it to find a distribution partner and work out the bugs.
Demo Video
I got excited by the demos and immediately though of applying it to my side cases so I could ditch the drybags and not worry about my Seattle rainy season commute. It looks like the stuff is badly backordered and not yet regularly available in the stores, so I ordered some to be shipped to my home. Here’s how it worked for me…
As sold, Neverwet is a two-part spray. A basecoat (with a 30 minute dry time between coats) and a topcoat (2 minutes between coats). It sounds like the more coats you put down, the more durable the coating is. The downside of additional coats is that you can really feel and see a thick coat. It’s kind of a textured, rubbery feeling, not terrible on the bags for example, but could be unpleasant on a shirt or hat maybe.
I took an hour or so to do a 2x base and 2x topcoat application. After another hour of drying time, I uncovered a few good and bad points about the product.
The good: It absolutely works as promised. It’s hilariously fun to pour water on the bags and watch the drops literally fly off, leaving zero trace of dampness. Water just cannot touch anything coated with this stuff.
The bad: The are upfront about the fact that the coating is not clear once dried, but rather a milky, frosted appearance. They tell you straight up not to coat clear things that you want to see through, for example. But the killer for me, and why I took the time to remove the product, is that the black fabric of the bags, with a milky white coating, gives a blueish appearance. I’m not so particular that this could be unacceptable for me if it were subtle, but in contrast with the grayish black seat, the effect was extremely noticeable. Worse, because it’s difficult to be perfectly even with the application, the result was that the blue appearance was mottled , and most noticeable around handles and edges. It was too bad to keep on, in my opinion.
I didn’t get pictures, but you can get the idea from this person’s review of an application on his gloves.
Test on Gloves
Somewhere in the documentation, the manufacturer mentions working on a version of this stuff that dries clear. When that’s out, I’ll try again. And to be clear, I have no problem using the product on light colored things, or on things where I just don’t care about the appearance. And also, to be fair, maybe I could have done much thinner coats, but the glove video shows I’m not alone seeing the color change.
Demo Video
I got excited by the demos and immediately though of applying it to my side cases so I could ditch the drybags and not worry about my Seattle rainy season commute. It looks like the stuff is badly backordered and not yet regularly available in the stores, so I ordered some to be shipped to my home. Here’s how it worked for me…
As sold, Neverwet is a two-part spray. A basecoat (with a 30 minute dry time between coats) and a topcoat (2 minutes between coats). It sounds like the more coats you put down, the more durable the coating is. The downside of additional coats is that you can really feel and see a thick coat. It’s kind of a textured, rubbery feeling, not terrible on the bags for example, but could be unpleasant on a shirt or hat maybe.
I took an hour or so to do a 2x base and 2x topcoat application. After another hour of drying time, I uncovered a few good and bad points about the product.
The good: It absolutely works as promised. It’s hilariously fun to pour water on the bags and watch the drops literally fly off, leaving zero trace of dampness. Water just cannot touch anything coated with this stuff.
The bad: The are upfront about the fact that the coating is not clear once dried, but rather a milky, frosted appearance. They tell you straight up not to coat clear things that you want to see through, for example. But the killer for me, and why I took the time to remove the product, is that the black fabric of the bags, with a milky white coating, gives a blueish appearance. I’m not so particular that this could be unacceptable for me if it were subtle, but in contrast with the grayish black seat, the effect was extremely noticeable. Worse, because it’s difficult to be perfectly even with the application, the result was that the blue appearance was mottled , and most noticeable around handles and edges. It was too bad to keep on, in my opinion.
I didn’t get pictures, but you can get the idea from this person’s review of an application on his gloves.
Test on Gloves
Somewhere in the documentation, the manufacturer mentions working on a version of this stuff that dries clear. When that’s out, I’ll try again. And to be clear, I have no problem using the product on light colored things, or on things where I just don’t care about the appearance. And also, to be fair, maybe I could have done much thinner coats, but the glove video shows I’m not alone seeing the color change.
