Engine Paints

Rust-Oleum

American forums recommend Rust-Oleum engine enamel constantly. The UK company of the same name doesn't sell it. What the range is, and why you can't buy it here.

Updated 2026-09-18

On this page
  1. Who they are
  2. The American engine range
  3. Why you can't buy it here
  4. Sources
  • Rust-Oleum's engine enamels are American products, rated to 260°C or 315°C intermittent depending on the line.
  • The UK business under the same name sells decorating paint and has no engine enamel.
  • The two halves grew up separately for thirty years, which is why the ranges differ.
  • Rust-Oleum specifies its own primer under its engine enamel, the opposite of Hycote's instruction.
  • A Rust-Oleum decorating aerosol is not engine paint, whatever the badge suggests.

Who they are

Rust-Oleum starts with a sea captain and some fish oil. Robert Fergusson noticed that fish oil spilt on his ship's steel deck stopped rust from spreading. He worked with a chemist on a version that dried overnight and didn't smell, and in 1921 he started an anti-rust paint company in New Orleans with 24 colours. He moved to Chicago in 1932 and founded the Rust-Oleum Paint Co, and a plant opened at Evanston, Illinois in 1939.

The European business grew separately, and earlier than most people assume. An office and factory opened at Haarlem in the Netherlands in 1959. It moved in 1969 to Roosendaal, to a building still in use. The French distributor Gachot was bought in 1983.

The order of the takeovers explains the present. RPM bought Rust-Oleum's European business in 1991 and the American company in 1994. By then each half had been developing its own products for three decades. So the Rust-Oleum range a British buyer sees today is different from the one an American forum is talking about.

The American engine range

The engine products sit in Rust-Oleum's American automotive catalogue.

600° Engine Enamel is the top of the range. Rust-Oleum describes it as a ceramic coating for engines and other surfaces that reach up to 600°F intermittently, which is 315°C. It claims colour retention and chemical resistance, and says to use it over Rust-Oleum's Engine Primer Spray.

Engine Enamel and Engine Enamel Metallic sit a step below, rated to 500°F intermittent, or 260°C.

High Heat is the exhaust product, a ceramic enamel for surfaces up to 1,093°C, resistant to petrol and oil, sold with a matching primer. A barbecue and stove paint and a caliper paint complete the list.

Note the word intermittent, which appears on both engine lines. It describes a peak the coating will tolerate. The paint is not rated to sit at that temperature.

Then there is primer. Rust-Oleum specifies its own under both the engine enamel and the High Heat coating. Hycote's sheet says to use none at all, and POR-15 wants its Metal Prep first. Each instruction belongs to its own paint and doesn't carry over to another brand, which is why primers has a page of its own.

Rust-Oleum's product pages give no heat cure schedule. VHT and Hycote both publish one for their equivalent paints. Read the tin before deciding that no cure is needed.

Why you can't buy it here

A British reader's problem is simple: this range isn't sold in the UK.

Rust-Oleum's UK consumer business is a decorating brand. Its site sells limewash, chalky furniture paint, kitchen cupboard and tile paint, radiator paint, and finishes for uPVC and garden metalwork. The nearest it gets to high temperature is a stove and barbecue spray filed under garden. It has no engine enamel category. The European industrial site is arranged by application, from anti-slip floors to line marking, and automotive isn't one of them. The UK operation trades from Tor Coatings in Gateshead.

So when an American restoration thread says to use Rust-Oleum 600° Engine Enamel, that product isn't on a British shelf. The UK range shares the badge and nothing else relevant to an engine. Importing a can means moving an aerosol across a border, with the carriage limits and cost that brings.

The colours are American in any case. For a British engine shade, the colour reference is the place to start. For a UK-made paint on a motor factor's shelf, compare Hycote. The shop lists the engine paints you can get in Britain today.

Sources