Super glue

[No skills]

Greetings.

I want to stabilise a small piece of wood that has some fine cracks/shakes in it, I think a runny superglue maybe a better choice than epoxy as the cracks are very fine and I want the glue to wick down into them ( without having to bugger about with a vacum).
Any suggestions for brands to use? or should I just go to the pound shop and buy up all the little tubes they have got

I've also got a couple of small areas I'd like to fill a little, has anybody mixed in any coloured filler with ca glue to achieve a coloured filler or is that usually done with epoxy?

Cheers.

 

[CHJ]

Thin CA is best it will wick right through porous woods like Red Oak or the cracks in Yew.

I use 5Star Brand or Chestnuts versions but for your purpose they are all much of a muchness.

CA works fine for filling with coloured dust/coffee grounds etc. If the gaps are big do it in stages, dripping thin CA onto dust and beware of the heat generated.

 

[NazNomad]

I've used pound-shop CA to hold together some dubious turnings, seems to work fine.

Watch the dust when you're sanding it though, makes your eyes water.

 

[Rhossydd]

+1 on poundshop CA.
I read of it recommended in the woodturning forum here and have been very impressed with it's performance.....and value.

 

[oakmitre]

CA Glues are compatible with solvent dye powder.

If you have Red, Yellow and Blue solvent dyes you can make a range of colours. They will not be as light fast as earth pigments though.

I have made a small example of Blue, Red, and Green (made from mixing yellow and blue) in Poundland CA glue. The wood is B&Q's finest spruce.

 

[oakmitre]

The solvent dyes are transparent, so if you put them into a hole in wood they do look darker. In industry it is usual to use these dyes in combination with titanium dioxide white to make them opaque and brighter.

If you are looking to reproduce a wood colour then the Iron oxide earth pigments brown/red/yellow in combination with titanium white and/or carbon black can easily (and cheaply) produce a huge range covering almost every possible wood colour.

You can mix the earth pigments in acetone, get the correct colour match. You can then allow the acetone to evaporate which leaves behind the perfect mix of powder.

They can be mixed in water, but it takes a long time to dry out if you want to add them to a non waterbased glue.

The dry powder can then be added to CA glue or Cascamite / PVA / PU Glue. You just have to remember once adulterated, the glue strength will be affected.

If anyone is interested I can post a little sampler of colours on a piece of light coloured wood.

 

[NazNomad]

If anyone is interested I can post a little sampler of colours on a piece of light coloured wood.

Very interested, I get through a lot of CA but it's never something I'd thought about adding colour to.

 

[ED65]

+2 on poundshop superglue. Perfectly decent quality in my experience.

I've also got a couple of small areas I'd like to fill a little, has anybody mixed in any coloured filler with ca glue to achieve a coloured filler or is that usually done with epoxy?

I've filled a few times by putting dust into the crack, running over superglue, more dust, superglue, until proud of the surface. Can work well but I wouldn't use it on a large-ish hollow. I've tried pre-mixing but the superglue is so fast drying that nearly any powder will set it practically instantly. For me it's epoxy all the way for this kind of thing. Or you could use hide glue, drying time would be about the same.

I would tend to use superglue for the cracks but ever tried heating epoxy? Gets as runny as melted butter and you can blow it into the cracks pretty well just using a straw or the barrel of a pen.

 

[devonwoody]

Oh you naughty boys, I never knew anything about that sort of thing. :lol:

So tell me about those dyes you are using. (I have plenty of watercolour and acrylic paints in tubes, anygood).

I do use superglue dabs when clamping is a problem, normal titebond 3 and dabs seem to work ok.

 

[oakmitre]

The dyes that I have are solvent yellow 16,solvent blue 35,solvent red 23.

They are very potent and 1g is a lot !

They are very soluble in acetone,butyl acetate.Soluble in most hydrocarbons - anything similar to petrol / lighter fluid / naphtha etc.

They are not very soluble in alcohols and insoluble in water.

With reference to acrylic paints. They are water based. They can be mixed into PVA / Cascamite etc very well as they are. They will change the properties of the glue. They can be mixed into PU glue but will cause foaming. If you dried them out and crushed them ( or used powder paint or grated watercolour) they would work as a pigment in solvent based stuff. Whether the pigment then bleeds in the solvent depends upon what it is made of.

In a packet of paints it depends upon the manufacture and sometimes the quality what is in them. In the very best oil paints that are designed to last, they will probably be the most stable insoluble inorganic pigments including some fairly toxic things with heavy metals in. In the cheaper stuff some colours may be pigments ( such as iron oxide), others dyes (mixed with titanium dioxide white) and others could be fillers dyed to make pigment (for example a potent solvent based dye insoluble in water could be used to stain a cheaper filler for use in water based acrylic - sort of a pseudo pigment if you like.)

Edit : to answer your original question - superglue is catalysed by water - so wet acrylics are probably not suitable for what you want.

 

[Random Orbital Bob]

Twas I that recommended pound shop CA glue....and I in turn heard about it through our club. Specifically, I get it from poundland (not tried any of the other stores so they may stock the sane stuff) and it comes in a 4 pack of 7g bottles.

My assumption has always been that its because its only a pound that its so runny ie its basically excrement and I would never use it for actually gluing anything in normal circumstances. But because its so runny it's a fabulous gap filler for fine fissures, especially when mixed with dust (I scrape the fine stuff off the filter in the DX and keep it in cups for judicious use). You can even get really pedantic and keep dust from darker woods like walnut as well as the blondes to suit the wood you're filling.

 

[paulm]

I used to get mine from Toolstation, decent sized bottles and the best price I could find, although haven't needed any recently so that may not still be the case.

 

[No skills]

Thank you one and all.
I super glued some cracks (oh err!) last night with some medium (ish) no nonsense glue from poofix. I also did a small fill but used epoxy and sawdust rather than CA as I wouldn't of had enough glue.

One more fill and some tiny cracks to do with some very runny pound shop glue.

Thanks

 

[NazNomad]

I get it from poundland (not tried any of the other stores so they may stock the sane stuff) and it comes in a 4 pack of 7g bottles.

Same here, and because it's endorsed by Tommy Walsh, it must be good. (p.s. my dad met him in Jewson, wasn't impressed). :lol: :lol:

 

[Random Orbital Bob]

I'm sure Tommy has full faith in all the products he endorses and isn't "just doing it for the money" :shock:

 

[Phil Pascoe]

and to go with the £ land CA - http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Zap-Products- ... 1138509634?
They usually have the 5min. one, but must be out.

 

[rafezetter]

Another +1 for pound shop glue to re-inforce the fibres for chiselling, even for softwoods. I've also used it for years in scale modelling as a filler too, talcum powder works well and gives you a reasonable window maybe 10 seconds so mix just enough for 1 hole at a time, it takes very little powder though, so maybe the instaset issues people find are because of too much powder.

As an aside the high viscosity is deliberate, and not due to quality as expensive CA's come in a range of viscosity as well including the same as pound shop "water thin".

 

[MarkDennehy]

I've found ebay's a bit handier - 50g of bondfix for £6 isn't horrible value, and you can grab it in a range of viscosities. I tend to use it mostly for that luthier's masking tape trick but it's damn handy to have around for a million other reasons so buying a 150g or so of it at a time isn't terribly wasteful...
I've gotten mine from here, here and here but I'm sure there are a dozen others too.

 

[Tim_H]

Just another warning about heat generation with CA especially if using an accelerator (which you may not need if you are using thin viscosity in fine cracks). I use a thicker viscosity off Amazon for pen finishes and managed to burn my finger quite badly last week when a drip of glue and accelerator dropped on my very carelessly placed hand. I had not realised how very hot it becomes, Hot enough to burn a few millimetres into the skin of one finger, it has still not healed completely. I will not be doing that again!

 

[Phil Pascoe]

I managed to hot glue my thumb to piece of wood earlier on ...