Cement & Glue in December MR issue

Useful table for beginners. But it leaves out some useful stuff.

Acrylic latex caulking compound, Phenoseal is one brand name, which is supremely useful for sticking down foamboard, cork roadbed, and flex track.

Liquid Nails construction adhesive, useful in benchwork building but harmful to foamboard.

PLZ300, a foam safe construction adhesive.

He mentions the classic cellulose cements (Ambroid and Duco) but leaves them out of the table. I still use them for sticking down paper and gluing wood parts. The benefit is very fast dry time, no clamping required. Strength is adequate to most modeling needs.

The author mentions that you can accidently stick body parts (fingers) together with CA, and suggests keeping a “debonder” handy. He fails to mention that ordinary acetone, which many of us have in the shop, is the debonder.

He mentions good old Walther’s Goo, but fails to mention that it will deform styrene plastic over time, and thus is not a good choice for gluing ballast into plastic freight cars. Silicone bathtub caulk is a much better choice, it never lets go, and is harmless to plastic.

He talks about plastic welder and goes on to recommend using “proper cement for the specific plastic”. Tenax, Testors, and Ambroid never failed to bond any reasonable plastic for me. They won’t stick to that slippery engineering plastic, but they never had trouble with anything else. I have gone on to use MEK, a quart of MEK can be had from the price of one teeny weeny bottle of Tenax. MEK works as good as anything I every bought at the LHS in teeny weeny little bottles.

Glues I been using for decades without issues.

Testors tube glue

Testors bottle glue

Walthers Goo…Once it dries the part will never fall off.

Last 2 years I added E-Z Bond instant (indeed it is) thin and medium glue.If a accident should happen soap and warm water will release the glued fingers as per the instructions.

As I said many times I’m a old school modeler and once I find something that works I stick with it for years.

The Plastruct people have a useful guide on their website, obviously tilted towards their own products but useful in general. Since they are the primary supplier of shapes and sheets that use ABS plastic it is helpful to know what works with that product. When it was newly introduced and guys were not as familiar with it there was a lot of frustration that the cement at hand that worked so well for styrene did not always work with ABS, or when mixing plastics in the same project.

http://www.plastruct.com/pages/CementGuide.html

(sorry for some reason I am not able to make links “live” on the Forums as I was before)

Dave Nelson

http://www.plastruct.com/pages/CementGuide.html

Cheers, [D]

Frank

Edit: It appears, I can’t copy this link either.

http://www.plastruct.com/pages/CementGuide.html

I tried another way.

Edit; now it works.