I am amazed how many people don’t know about these big paint rollers. I have seen many people in the industry come to me and ask whats that? To which I reply “You don’t know?” Wow. However, I totally understand not knowing about them, I have been in paint stores for countless hours and did I ever stumble upon it? No!
One day enjoying a day off I was walking down the street in the summer and that being summer of course there was construction not to far away. I then laid my eyes upon this enormous beast of a roller. That just couldn’t be true something like that couldn’t exist. An image like that never left me and I often wondered about it. I could not lie to myself no more when my studious partner retrieve reference of this mystical materialistic possession. I still remember walking to the paint store that day, gathering up the courage, pronouncing that I did not know of this item and do they have it?
What they are is pretty much double sized roller. I mean double the size roller you know of. Yes they do have smaller ones, they get down to 2 to 3 inch. In a painters arsenal rollers are big tools and a great painter would benefit from both large and small rollers. Surely a roller double the size would do double the work? You hit the nail with the hammer this time! So tomorrow when you go to work all the painters you’ll see will have an “18-er” as I like to call them.
Okay, so they are not without their flaws… They do get double the work done, but when do you get ahead in life without a price to pay. Look at getting a car, you may think “Oh great! I’m going to be able to go to that class across town now!”. True, however make sure you include gas, insurance and maintenance. Likewise with 18″ rollers, they’re darn heavy. Well they are heavier than your standard size but they aren’t double the weight. They can be a little cumbersome but once you have the control, you look around at all the 9″ rollers and realize you’re the jumbo-jet of the lot! It does feel like that!
Coincidentally, just like a jumbo-jet’s gas bill the 18-er (as I like to call them) has a bigger bill. The sleeves can cost double and sometimes triple the price of their small 9″ cousins. Does the carpet match the drapes? In price I guess so! It also take a lot more work to clean them too. You better be a certified painting academy ‘Roller Cleaning Technician’. Forget about cleaning them in your standard sink. If your lucky enough to have a laundry sink then you may have a chance. To dry them off after cleaning it’s worthwhile to have a large garbage bin that you can spin them in (using a good-old roller spinner). A trick reserved for technicians is to hold open a large garbage bag just right and spin the roller inside the confines, but that’s a two man task.