Wooster vs. Trylon: A Side-by-Side Comparison

Home Depot sells an insane number of brushes from different brands. However, their most popular brushes are sold by two brands: Wooster and Trylon. I want to test them side by side using a cheap brush I have lying around as a control.

The Wooster 2″ shortcut brush I purchased was $5.87 and the Trylon 2″ shortcut brush was $8.47. Trylon boasts specialty technology that holds more paint than a normal paint brush. Will it be worth the increase in price?

The Wooster brush handle is designed to fit neatly into the center of your palm. The handle design does limit the number of ways in which I could hold the brush comfortably, but it is ultra-comfy in that one position.

The slight tensions the rubber handle provides allowed me to to get a solid grip on the handle without a ton of squeezing. The rubber also flexes and moves with my hand, which makes painting super comfortable.

The Trylon brush handle is made of wood and has a more traditional handle shape. I could hold the medium-length handle in a couple comfortable positions. However, the raw-wood handle doesn’t have a pleasant feel in my hand.

The Merit Pro brush handle is long and made of plastic. The plastic is super slippy and hard to get a solid grip on. I could hold the brush handle in a couple different positions, but the handle didn’t have an ergonomic design. There was no truly comfortable position to hold it in.

Of all the brushes, the Wooster was the easiest to be precise with. This is partially due to it’s handle design; the close grip gave me more control over the brush and partially due to the nicely tapered edge.

The Trylon brush also has a tapered edge, but I found that the handle design was actually the most important factor in precision. The handle design defined the amount of control I had on each brush.

The Merit Pro brush didn’t have a tapered edge and was wholly unsuitable for precision work.

The Wooster brush is the easiest in my lineup to clean. It cleans up fastest, and it dries back in its original shape. The Merit Pro brush is pretty average as far as cleanup goes.

The Trylon brush, however, is quite a pain to clean up. I think this is because it has more bristles than the other two brushes and because the bristles are more tightly packed.

Trylon claims to paint 30% farther than a standard brush. I set up a test with each of the three brushes, and I was honestly surprised by the significant difference in how each brush performed. Trylon holds more paint than any of the other brushes by far, which accounts for the greater difficulty in cleaning the brush.

With the Trylon brush, my brushstrokes were  visible when I used thick paints. With the other brushes, the brushstrokes were never an issue.

Overall, I preferred the Wooster brush to the Trylon. It was more comfortable to work with and allowed me to be more precise. It performed far better than the Merit Pro brush and was well worth the difference in price.

If you have a project where long clean brushstrokes are important (applying a protective polyurethane, for example), a Trylon brush could be a good investment, but as a general rule, I don’t think it would be worth the money.

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