Has anybody used Hammerite spray paint for anything in recent years?
I have used smooth Hammerite from a tin with a paintbrush numerous times in the past for a variety of things from metal to MDF to wood, and it has always dried really hard and formed a very resilient coating, for example on the white handle of a metal double-glazed back door, on kitchen cabinet doors and cabinet cornices, bathroom shelves, and so on. As has happened with a lot of different types of paint over the years they obviously reduced the amount of harmful solvents in the paint-on Hammerite but it still seemed to be pretty good to apply and dried just as rock-hard. Compared with other "gloss" paints Hammerite seems/seemed to have a much higher grade of solvent that smells more like chloroform than ordinary cellulose thinners or turps. I've never used aerosol Hammerite though, and I would guess that being an aerosol they may have changed the formulation more than the paint in a tin.
I want a very hard coating on the top of a round drop-leaf table that sits in my kitchen and was damaged by hand sanitiser leaking onto it when we were right in the middle of Covid. It ate into the top layer of whatever the fake wood covering is made from, presumably plastic of some kind rather than a "formica" type layer. I was thinking of filling in the bits that were eaten into with wood filler or similar, then applying a thick undercoat and sanding it smooth, then using something like smooth Hammerite to give it a really hard-wearing glossy or satin coating. When gloss paints were all really smelly and with lots of solvents I found them much easier to paint with a brush and achieve a finish free from overlap and brush strokes, and Hammerite was great because it took a while to dry and "sagged" back down and self-levelled even if you applied it quite thickly. Some of the paints with the reduced solvents (often called "water-based" even though they still have a bit of solvent) seem to dry faster and it's harder to get as smooth a finish. That's why I was wondering about aerosol Hammerite.
Anybody used aerosol Hammerite recently that can give their observations?
Comments
But are you not perhaps after something really tough? Ronseal hardglaze? IIRC or maybe Envirotex lite (epoxy type finish, tough as nails) for a table?