I'm installing a bridge on my layout and am having some difficulty gluing the styrene bridge piers (back and bottom) to the wood base. All suggestions would be most welcome.
Walther's Goo seems to be a good all around adhesive. Be sure you don't use too much, cause Goo will warp plastic and remember that it dries in a deep orange color, so you may have to paint it after
it dries up.
I have used a "white mastic" type glue for this type of thing. I forget the brand, but you can buy it at Color Tile. The things I like about it, are that:
1) you only need a TINY drop (like cyanoacrilate glue), and
2) it dries milky-clear.
I must have half a dozen bonding agents on the bench, and I can usually find a place for them all.
Plastic Weld from Plastruct has some body to it, leaves a residue and gums up a brush something fierce, clogs most of my small-to-medium hyponeedles. Bonds ABS, Plexiglass (acrylics) where the
Testor's doesn't.
Testors Liquid- the old standby. I use it most for general applications.
Tenax. No mercy at all- it bonds almost instantly, evaporates faster than you can use it, even through the seal on the bottle.
I also have some MEK, but I get no advantage from it over the others.
For body cements, I use contact cement- Pliobond, Goo or for that matter Elmer's. Interchangable for me, so I buy what I find where I find it when I need it.
"Scotch Super Strength" cement is my choice when I need a cement like Ambroid or that type. I get mine at office supply stores. Stronger, doesn't deteriorate the way Ambroid does here in the desert.
Every kit I'd built in Florida before I moved here using Ambroid fell apart after a few years.
And of course, various types of CA- thick and slow, thin and fast, gap filling. I prefer the brands that come in small bottles since I find a lot of it cures in the bottle before I get to it. There
is a line that is marketed for hobby shops to put their own labels on, and I don't like it at all.
Then there are solders. Mostly I used "Tix" or "StaBrite" silver-bearing solder for brass and steel soldering, but I'm now using a recent solder offered by PBL. It's a flux-cored solder, contains no
lead, among the strongest solders made (10,000# shear strength they claim), moderately high temperature but not as high as StaBrite. Flux washes off with water and the residue isn't going to eat the
joint apart in a day if you don't get to it right away- important since my house has an evaporative cooler, typical in the desert, and I can grow moss on the bench during the summer. Great for
soldering up steel handrail sets on Athearn, for instance.
Beside the "Touch'n'flow" applicator and the hypodermic needles, I use the Teflon tubing some of the CA makers offer in the CA bottles. My soldering iron for normal work is an ancient Ungar pencil
with interchangable heating tips, but I've also got a resistance soldering machine I use on brass locos.
Fred D.
Any advice from those who have already model on tricks to make assembly easier, or unclear information in the instructions, that I should be aware of.
It sure seems that this model, with all of its pieces, is screaming "PREPAINT SUB-ASSEMBLIES!" at me. Any words from the wise about this? I'm pretty new at airbrushing, but I intend this bridge to
represent a well maintained bridge on a smaller Class 1 railroad... i.e. painted one solid color with only a light hint of rust weathering. Can it just as easily be done at the end, when everything
is assembled, or is sub-assembly painting advised even though they're all going to be the same color?
...Mark...the one thing i learned early on was that AFTER i painted styrene, i couldn't get it to "glue together" with CA...it LOOKS like it's glued, but just a touch and it pulls the paint off and
falls apart...so i glue the whole thing together FIRST now, and fill in the gaps and holes with "styrene putty" (put styrene scraps in a small jar along with some CA)...then paint to my heart's
content... :))
How do you repair the damage caused by glue marks other than just buying a new kit and starting over?
I've had good results using a Paache "Air Eraser" (a small, jeweler's sand blaster) to remove ACC and solvent scars, but it's not a cheap way to do it- you need the tool, the compressed air and
ideally a blast booth or the like.
I bought mine when I was doing a lot of brass steam work, and it works truly great for removing excess solder, so I've kept it for plastic as well.
Fred D.
I have found out that the worse thing to do with an "oops" is to try to blot it immediately. That just makes things worse. Sometimes if you let it dry then weather it, it looks like a proto-"oops."
<g>
Mike Tennent
I have had some luck erasing glue spillover with 0000 steel wool.
Lester