Wednesday, May 13, 2009

Glue Frenzy

I've been searching all over for some sort of adhesive that will effectively attach my styrene skins to the plywood frame. It's a tricky chemical problem because lots of the glues for plastics work by actually dissolving the plastic itself, so if you are putting to like plastics together, they form a really strong bond. But attaching to wood requires that the glue have some weird hybrid properties. I bought and tried 6-10 different kinds of glues. Nothing seemed to create a sound joint on my test pieces of styrene and plywood. Then I found some stuff that's a variation on super glue. It's by a company called Devcon, and the retail name is Grip-Ton-Ite. I know, the name is so stupid I almost didn't use it. But in the testing, that stuff is creating by far the strongest bond. The plastic broke off before the glue gave up. So that's what I'll try to use to do the inner skins to the plywood frame. Then I'll use some sort of styrene specific glue for the outer skins to the inner skins. That shouldn't be as hard, although I want to be carefully about ooze and spill over. I don't want glue oozing out into all of those carefully cut little channels. We'll see what I can pull off. And I"ll post about the results of the inner skins to the frame as soon as I have made some headway on it. No time with my students all taking finals next week.