Wednesday evening I sprayed the missiles for my F-105 with Tamiya acrylic. They are round, but with the fin arrangement sort of four-sided so I just decided to stick them to some low-tack masking tape and spray them laying flat on my spray board. Spray one side, let it dry, rotate the missiles 90 degrees, spray the next, and so on. Acrylics dry so fast, especially with a fan blowing on them, that there wasn't much lost time.
Needless to say, when I got done there were a couple of spots on the noses that had stuck to the tape before the paint was completely dry and got messed up when I pulled them up. The paint didn't pull loose on the tape, it just got roughed up. No big deal, says I, I'll sand the rough spots down tomorrow and respray them.
Last night I got ready to fix them, picked up the first missile that had a bad spot on it, and started looking for the spot to fix. Hmmm .... no bad spot. Picked up the next one. Hmmmm .... no bad spot. I could not find a single rough spot to fix. I guess that since the paint was acrylic it just sort of "Stretched" when I pulled it off the tape and then smoothed back down as the paint cured. I got lucky, and in this case my mistakes actually looked better after 24 hours but it could just as easily have gone the other way.
The moral of the story: Just because paint feels dry doesn't mean it has cured completely. The people who tell you (or in this case the people that told me!) that paint takes 24 to 48 hours to completely cure know what they are talking about! There are some highly experienced people on this forum (and I don't include myself in that group) and their advice is well worth listening to.