Review Policy

The claim we do not make

Sprue & Brush does not run a test lab, and no page here says we tested anything. We have not sprayed forty primers onto identical models in controlled humidity, measured the tip retention of twenty brushes over fifty sessions, or compared airbrush spray patterns with instruments.

Plenty of sites imply they have. We would rather compete on something we can actually deliver: published, reproducible reasoning. Every recommendation here is traceable to a manufacturer specification you can check or an argument you can disagree with — which is a weaker claim than a test result and a far more honest one.

What picks are based on

• Manufacturer specifications. Nozzle diameters, bottle volumes, bristle material, working areas, grade and part counts. Every roundup lists the sources it used, with the date we last checked them.
• How the product is designed to be used, and whether that matches what a beginner actually needs. A lot of our reasoning is about fit for purpose rather than quality — an excellent 0.2 mm airbrush is a poor first airbrush.
• Material and physical constraints. Why solvent cement cannot bond resin, why humidity frosts a topcoat, why a wash creates shadow. These are properties of the materials, not opinions, and they drive a large share of the advice here.
• Stated criteria, published per page. Every roundup opens with a “how we picked” section naming what was weighed. If you disagree with a pick, you can see which criterion you would have weighted differently.

What the scores mean

Roundups carry a score out of 10 per product, broken into four to six criteria chosen for that category. The score is our editorial read against those stated criteria, not a measurement. It exists to make the ranking legible — so you can see that a product placed second because it scored badly on one thing you may not care about.

Three consequences worth stating:

• Scores are not comparable across categories. An 8.8 brush and an 8.8 compressor were judged against entirely different criteria.
• Scores are not aggregated from user reviews. We do not scrape or average other people’s ratings.
• Scores never appear in our structured data. Marking an editorial score up as a machine-readable product rating would present a judgment as a measurement, which contradicts this page. The number is on the page as content and nowhere else.

Prices and availability

We never type a price into a page. Prices render only from a live data layer with a 48-hour freshness gate — if the data is stale, the figure disappears and the button says “Check price on Amazon” instead. A site with no price is better than a site with a wrong one.

Where we discuss cost structurally — which item is the largest line, where the cheap option is good enough — we do it without numbers, as on the cost page.

How picks get changed

A recommendation changes when the reasoning behind it changes:

• A product is discontinued or no longer buyable.
• A specification changes, or we find that a cited source was wrong.
• A better-fitting product exists for the stated criteria.
• A reader makes an argument we cannot answer. This happens and it is welcome.

Pages carry a visible “last updated” date, and substantive corrections are made in place rather than quietly. If we get something wrong, email contact@sprueandbrush.com and it gets fixed.

Commercial independence

We earn affiliate commission, which is stated on every commercial page and set out in full on the affiliate disclosure. Commission does not decide rankings: where the cheaper product is the better buy, that is the pick. No product here has been supplied free, and nothing is sponsored.

The broader standards — who writes the site, what claims are permitted, how sources are cited — are on the editorial policy page.