Spray paint stays sticky after drying (need help)

Hi everyone,

So I'm spray painting some brass fittings with silver spray paint, but after a day of drying it's still sticky. The pigment itself seems dry as none of that is coming off, but if I keep the pipe fittings on a smooth surface, eventually they're stick to each other. Anyone know where I'm going wrong with this? The spray can brand used is Rustolium.

I am not experienced with this at all, but I wonder if you need some sort of sealer when spraying certain materials?

this is enamel it takes days to dry. *wait ~4 days - week.

Some spray paint can take up a week to fully dry depending on the conditions, if its not dry after a week you could try buying come kind of clear coat and put that over the top

did you do a primer coat first?

This.....

You also need to remember that many factors can effect the drying time as well... things like room/ambient temp ( or lack of ) humidity, the material your painting and how thick the coat is....

1 Like

So right now I'm going for super light coats (to the point you barely see a difference per coating). So far it looks promising, after an hour; with coatings every 3 minutes or so, there's little to no sticky residue so far. I'll probably go with Josh_Mck advise and add a clear coat just to make sure this stuff stays on.

As for what the can says: it's 1hr touch dry and 24hrs for complete dry.

I'll let you guys know if my current approach works. I'll probably give it 3 days before I let it touch anything.

Ya.... that totally failed, I'm guessing with brass you either need special enamel spray for the base coating or a different painting method. On a side note, I'm thinking of just tinning it with solder.....

Update:
Just tinned one of them and it came out looking pretty nice. However, it's a lot of work including filing, buffing and cleaning out all the built up gunk from the process.

a lot of paint stays sticky for a while... it has to cure, kind of like concrete, yes it gets hard relatively quick but you can't drive a car on it for weeks.

Try using a self etching primer first. You should always do this with metals.

1 Like

Putting a decent coating on raw metal is a pretty involved process. Much more so than painting wood or something else which has already been painted. The surface needs to be prepped and primed, and you need to use a primer that is compatible with both the base metal and the final coat.

Here's a guide for painting brass cabinet fittings.

So I finished getting the fitting painted finally and tested the coatings, so here's the results:

First of all, I needed 3 sprays in the end. The first being the etching spray, the second being the silver paint and the third being a clear coat (turns out the silver paint really sucks). Also special thanks to @SilverS4sAreFaster for the etching recommendation, dried in 1hr and didn't flake what so ever.

As for my attempts to tin the fittings, from the first few pictures you can see it looks promising with the before and after pictures, however you'll see that the top didn't coat well as the solder would always slide off one of the faces.


As for the finally results, I'm not 100% satisfied, but happy enough to consider it finished. In the end the fittings come off as a shiny grey than smooth silver. Below is a picture of the final result and when it was just tinned.

Thanks everyone for your help.

image