Tuesday, February 04, 2020

Gluing brass to wood

My dad is hard at work building the Hachette Hood partwork. There's an awful lot of really nice etched brass to cover the superstructure but the instructions are a bit light on suggestions for the best adhesive to use.

We've been trying a few tests with various glues using offcuts of both brass and plywood. The best bet seems to be UHU Power all-purpose glue. Used as a contact adhesive (spread on both parts, let it go tacky) the brass is very firmly fixed in place. Pulling the test parts we couldn't remove it once the glue was fully dry.

It's a nice thin bond too. Ideal for the job where you don't want lumpy glue messing the lines up.

2 comments:

Andrew Howard said...

If your Dad needs some more, they sell it in Poundland (for, you guessed it £1)

Huw Griffiths said...

This adhesive is definitely one of Poundland's better lines - and, I'd agree, it makes a great contact adhesive.

As for using scrap materials for test bond experiments, I'd definitely go along with that too. Let's face it - when I was installing strain gauges in my last job, I encountered some materials that seemed to have a real aversion to adhesive.

I wouldn't be surprised to see another mainstream modelmaking magazine feature soon about choosing and using adhesives.

Whether such a feature mentions double sided carpet tape - or combining adhesives - remains to be seen.