How not to clean your brushes

[dennis thompson]

I have been making some Santa sleds as Christmas decorations. They are about 18" long , have 66 parts and are painted 6-8 different colors. My brushes got clogged up with acrylic paint so I decided to clean them up with a cleaner I had. it was labeled "non toxic" and "biodegradable" so I put some in a plastic cup (big mistake) and put my brushes in the cup and left my workshop for a few hours. When I came back in a few hours the cup had disintegrated ! and the liquid cleaner was all over the top of my table saw (where I had stupidly left the cup)

[Ken Fitzgerald]

Ouch! Thanks for the heads up and reminder!

[Mark Bolton]

Acrylic is soap and water cleanup. We just wash with warm soapy water. If we are running solvents we almost never clean brushes til the job is done and just wrap them and stick them in the fridge for the night. The only issue with keeping wet brushes in the fridge is you need to let them warm up in the morning or they can draw moisture and give you grief if your shop is warm.

[Mark Bolton]

P.S. Get in the habit of washing your brushes out throughout the day. If you find yourself seeing paint up near the ferrule or your brush is just gloppy/sucky.. go wash it out. Good hard swirly scrub on your palm, hot water, soap, really wash it out, then dry on your pants or paper towels or whatever,... your brushes will last forever if you buy quality.

[Roy Petersen]

If the paint has dried on the brush (not foam brushes) or some other item that's ok being immersed in liquid, try diluted ammonia. Smallish amount to do, even something as diluted as straight Windex might work well enough, but for a heavy coating, soak them in diluted plain ammonia (3 or 4 parts water to 1 ammonia) that you can get cheaply from a grocery store. Put the item in a container you can close airtight (the fumes are really awful), and when you open it, be in a well ventilated place and don't inhale as you open it.
We do this to clean stencils that we use while airbrushing with 1 quart guns, and after a week or so soaking the paint falls off the acrylic stencil like magic. Rinse with a hose, clean up the bits it leaves behind in nooks, and done. Test on something that's not irreplaceable, just in case it goes badly. Use at your own risk, but it works great here.

[Charles Wiggins]

Acrylic should be water based clean up. For water based paints I first work as much paint as I can out of the bristles, even if I have to paint it onto a piece of cardboard. Then I wash it out in my "slop" bucket.

It's just a bucket of water where I do my first rinse on all my paint tools. Later on at some point the slop bucket gets dumped into a trash bag draped over a tray to dry out. When the solids are all that's left the bag goes in the trash.

Anyway, I then wash out with water and dab of Dawn dish soap and rinse repeatedly. If there's any paint stuck to the bristles I use a stainless wire brush to knock that loose and wash again. Once the washing is done I shake out the excess water and beat the bristles back and forth rapidly on a clean piece of corner trim, post, ladder, or any suitable edge to dry it out even more. If I'm done for the day I wrap the brush tightly, in the original packaging if I have it and it is designed for that, or a piece of brown kraft paper or paper bag. Lay it flat to finish drying.

[Doug Hepler]

Mark

Put solvent brushes in the refrigerator? Wipe them on your pants? Are you married? (rhetorical question)

Doug