Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
4/29/2020 3:51:17 PM
Subject:
Cyanoacrylate
Horrible stuff. Truly villainous. Very misleading. It makes you think you can glue anything to anything fast.
This is a bald falsehood.
It is good for gluing thread rigging to model ship masts. Well, the old instant runny stuff used to be. What they sell now is a puny viscous "safe" version that is still good for gluing your fingers together but not much else.
People use it because they have to do something to glue painted parts together. The recommended thing to do is scrape away the paint before gluing, but this is rarely possible. The place where you want to stick something to something else usually is microscopic in size, and any missing paint would (a) be impractical or impossible to touch up later and (b) look awful. Cyanoacrylate offers something like a 30/70 chance that a tiny piece will adhere to a tiny area, so that's why people use it. Also because they want faster drying than other glue allows, but for this they usually have to use a "kicker." This is a product that you buy in order to get another lame product to do what super glue used to do, you know, back when it was one product.
So anyway, I'm coming to a disturbing conclusion. Plain old Testors model glue may be the best thing you can use. It dries about as fast as cyanoacrylate. It has about the same chance of sticking one offending part to another. And because it's more viscous than modern super glue, it has a better chance of defying gravity while you race to do whatever it is you need to do.
I don't mean that dreadful airplane glue they sold ages ago. This is newer stuff that comes in a red tube. It's cheap and, as Will Pattison would say, it works good. He wouldn't say that about Testors model glue, but he would use that wording about anything that performs a function well. I wish he would make a primer on glues to go along with his paint chemistry video.
So there you have it, friends. Don't be led down the rose-strewn path to certain destruction. Flee cyanoacrylate. Get a tube of Testors today.
