Glue Wars

 The Thrifty Rocketeer blog continues...

No, this is not another "which glue is best" thread.

Instead, I want to share a couple of horror stories with you about why you should ask the above question.

When I first got into this hobby, I didn't have a lot of spare cash...I didn't have a lot of spray paint (yet)...and my glue options were few.

Now several years before, for Christmas, my wife bought a couple of these assemble-yourself-kit-furniture kits, and we started a tradition of assembling the "thing" immediately on Christmas evening after the meal was cleared.

Now, if you've ever assembled one of these pieces of furniture, you'll know that the instructions are stilted, the count of hardware is always exactly on, with virtually NO extras... and they supply their own tiny bottle of glue.

Typically, the tube is smaller than a tube of toothpaste, but about the size of a lip therapy Vaseline jelly tube.

As I recall the tube had a red or orange cap, and the transparent tube had white paste in it. Note that I didn't say white glue.  It was more like paste.

You were to squeeze some into every hole for a wooden peg, or dove-tailed joint for the shelf assembly.  In theory, this would dry and seize and hold things together for a few years longer than you needed.  Typically, this type of furniture would only last a four year college education before breaking or falling apart.

So this is what I had to assemble my first small kit:  Limited sky blue spray paint, A fair amount of white spray paint, and a small bottle of white glue-looking paste.

And so, I assembled my kit.

When I took it out to launch, I had an under-powered motor because I didn't understand motor classification, but that's another story.  Suffice it to say, my rocket didn't soar high and landed on hard ground without a streamer unfurled, and snapped a fin off.

Fortunately, a skilled rocketeer had some CA and helped me glue the fin back on immediately. He even had excellerant!

But after he donated a twice as powerful motor, and we had a successful launch...but again, the rocket lost yet another fin.  He began to suspect something was wrong with my glue.  And after a day of thought, I began to suspect my glue too.

When I got home, I tossed out that tiny bottle of paste, and bought a bottle of Elmer's Carpentry Glue (the yellow stuff)... and I've never looked back.  It's wonderful!

Now, I did have to force the original three fins off, sand, and re-glued them on the outside of the body tube again.... but I've never lost one of those fins ever again!

The point of this remembrance is to start with a strong enough, cheap glue.  There's a certain amount of baseline material that you need on a regular basis for this hobby.  And so, my recommendation is yellow glue.

However, after my kids went through elementary school, we wound up with a couple of bottles of school glue.  I went to look for something and found a bottle laying horizontal in a drawer of crayons and colored pencils. I picked it up, and looked to see how much was left.  Holding the translucent bottle up to the light, I realized that it was thick and not flowing.  And worse, the bottle had broken.  That is, the thin plastic squeeze bottle had aged, and cracked.  I tossed it.

The second part of this is when we combined a number of these school glue bottles into a larger classroom volume bottle.   I was careful to unscrew the cap and pour the remainder of some smaller glues into the large bottle.  There was still plenty left over.

But after a few of these bottles I realized that again, the bottle had cracked.  And I carefully turned the cap down onto the large bottle.  That's when I realized the bottle had not only cracked near the neck of the bottle, but the entire shoulder of the bottle was cracking. Glue was flowing over my fingers, and spilling down the side.

I barely made it to a waste basket to set the bottle down into the plastic liner.  I sought out a few of those smaller bottles to try to refill them, and recap them.  But it was a loosing proposition.  I eventually gave up and trashed it all.

But one of the best things I did, was to remove the pointed orange valve cap and soak it in water to soften and remove the glue.   This is important.

The chisel- tip cap from most of the carpentry glue bottles is very awkward to most unskilled modelers.  You need a fine tip dispenser cap.  It's worth salvaging one from a white glue bottle for use with your yellow glue  bottles in the future.

Dump the school glue...it's crap... but save the orange pointed tip!

That's the moral for today's blog entry.  And as always...

remember to cap your glue and save your scrap balsa, cause you'll need it eventually!