WOOHOO! Glue for polythene!!

Time for the actual review I guess.

I can sum up this glue in two words:-

Absobloodylutely unbelievable!

Yesterday I had a load of lancers to mount on their mounts, and thought it would be as good a time as any to try out the new sticky stuff. So, with a rarely felt anticipation, I ripped open the pack.

As I said, this is a two part kit; a primer pen and tube of cyanoacrylate-ish adhesive. Not yet feeling overly confident, I pinned the first pair of parts, then drew some primer onto the parts (doesn't sound right, but that's the best way to describe it - drawing). Apllied the glue, slid the figure into place and WHAM! it's stuck. not going anywhere. anywhere. ever. Luckily, these figures had seen quite a bit of conversion, and all the putty work around the rider's jacket formed something of a key with the horse saddle, so the figure slid into the correct place. Luckily I say, as there is no way that figure and horse are coming apart now.

OK, now I'm quite surprised, and more than a little excited (I know, this is glue I'm talking about... must get out more...) so for lancer No 2 I decide I don't need the pin. You know what? I didn't. Same procedure as before, this time without pinning, same result as before, what for all intents appears to be a one piece polythene casting of horse and rider, joined for all time.

So now I starts thinking. These types of joint are about the easiest to handle in polythene; lots of surface area, and two parts that almost lock together without glue in the first place. Some other test of this glue's performance may be in order.

I figured a good test would be a joint consisting of two small areas, two small areas that weren't atomically smooth and clean. I had visions of destructively testing this joint, so wanted something a bit more scientific and a bit less valuable than one of my figures. A piece of sprue provided a suitable test specimen. The piece was cut in half, with not too much attention paid to getting smooth faces. Pen, glue, stick. and they are STUCK! bit of finger pulling, no movement. Looked around for a suitable weight, found a big lump of lead from a diving belt, attached that to one end of the now one-piece length of sprue, and lifted... carefully. No hassle whatsoever.

Right, now I am amazed. This lump of lead is pretty heavy, so Time to get a bit more scientific. Enter a 7lb weight. Easy. Enter a 14lb weight, just as easy...



That is a 14lb weight! You should be able to see the join in the sprue, about a third of the way down from the jaws of the pliers.

Not having much else in the way of standardised weights, my next one was 56lb. Ha, my new friend balked at 56lb, the joint gave without appearing to put up any fight at all.

Conclusions

The glued sprue joint would appear to have a breaking strain of between 14 and 56lb. That should probally be sufficient to hold together polythene figures weighing around 0.005g.


This opens up a whole new field of operations. Normally you can get a reasonably soild joint in polythene using pins and superglue, but you are obvioulsy limited in some ways. The join is never very strong, and you cannot pin anything smaller than your pins, obviously. You can go down to ever smaller gauges of wire, but there comes a point where there is no point. So glueing riders to horses, head swaps, even arm swaps are worth a go, although the joints will probably break eventually. Not with the new stuff!

I decided to get cocky and try a hand swap. When the hands of your figures are less than 1mm in all dimensions, pinning is not really an option. I had a figure holding a revolver who needed a lance, and a figure with an open hand who needed a revolver. Two days ago, I would have lopped of the visible bits of revolver, bored a hole through the hand, and fitted a lance. The guy who needed a revolver would get a very rudimentary one scratched from wire and putty and precariously glued in place. This time, I lopped of the two hands, primed and glued. (fiddly getting them in place, but do-able) I now had two figures with perfectly secured hands. The hand that needed the lance was joined so strongly I was able to drill through it once it was glued in place to fit the lance.


Downsides

There has to be some, surely.

Well, price. It's a little pricey, but no more than the better superglues. and it since it works first time every time, you aren't going to waste much of it, or your time.

Messy. No different to other small tube superglues, it has a tendency to gum up the nozzle. less of a problem if you do everything right by the book and clean the tube everytime you use, like you are supposed to with superglue. But I always seem to get a couple of squeezes out a tube before coming back to it to find it useless. I expect the same thing to happen here. Of course you can reduce this problem by having a load of joints ready to glue at once. Glue the lot, then do your cleaning properly. Or, if you're really lucky, you'll finish the whole tube in one sitting and won't have to worry about cleaning it.

For me though the biggest disadvantage is the primer pen. It has a big thick chisel tip, which i not ideal for applying to 10mm figures, but I guess it could be trimmed down with a scalpel. Also, the primer is colourless, and quite dry compared to other marker-type pens, so it's not easy to tell where you've been. I don't think this is a major, as the primer doesn't appear to have any effect on the figures unless the glue is applied to the same spot.