Every time that I needed to deal with paint; was the same unavoidable messy spills. Today I fixed the always nasty situation.

Cut-off 2 litre soda bottle necks; drilled 25 mm holes on lids and force inserted from inside. Made a couple.

The lid can be transplanted to a next paint can when emptied. No need to make many. Simpler in plastic than metal lids. Am happy, this has to be a good thing.😀 There is larger necks in juice bottles if preferred...

Edited... Someday I will learn to attach images...

3 hours ago, Externet said:

Every time that I needed to deal with paint; was the same unavoidable messy spills. Today I fixed the always nasty situation.

Cut-off 2 litre soda bottle necks; drilled 25 mm holes on lids and force inserted from inside. Made a couple.

The lid can be transplanted to a next paint can when emptied. No need to make many. Simpler in plastic than metal lids. Am happy, this has to be a good thing.😀 There is larger necks in juice bottles if preferred...

Edited... Someday I will learn to attach images...

I don’t understand either the problem or the solution here. Can you elaborate?

Edited 11 hours ago11 hr by exchemist

My guess is that the solution introduces a bottle neck with a pouring lip to make pouring easier. There are also paint spouts which are just bits of plastic that you can clip to your can for the same purpose. There are also full lids that have a similar setup as those in OP that you can buy. However I mostly just get these clip-on spouts as they are pretty universal in size and usually fairly cheap.

Edit: If I want to feel like a real genius, I would design one in Autocad, 3D print in the fanciest way possible, spent much more than getting the stuff from the store and forget to file down some crucial bit so that the paint goes everywhere when I pour it. I haven't actually done that, but it is possible that my wife made a convincing argument against that route.

10 hours ago, CharonY said:

My guess is that the solution introduces a bottle neck with a pouring lip to make pouring easier. There are also paint spouts which are just bits of plastic that you can clip to your can for the same purpose. There are also full lids that have a similar setup as those in OP that you can buy. However I mostly just get these clip-on spouts as they are pretty universal in size and usually fairly cheap.

Edit: If I want to feel like a real genius, I would design one in Autocad, 3D print in the fanciest way possible, spent much more than getting the stuff from the store and forget to file down some crucial bit so that the paint goes everywhere when I pour it. I haven't actually done that, but it is possible that my wife made a convincing argument against that route.

Ah, now I get it. It is when you decant from the tin into something else. As I generally use paint straight from the tin, dipping the brush into it, I didn't see what this was about. But I suppose this applies when one uses a roller and therefore has to decant paint into a roller tray. When I've done that it has been water-based emulsion paint, which is pretty viscous and doesn't seem to spill much (and is also easy to wipe up with kitchen roll), but with oil-based paint I can imagine spillage could be an issue.