Background- Gluing rocket parts to plastic seems to be a problem. Some Estes kits come with plastic transitions or plastic tail cones that need to be glued in. I'm working on an Estes Black Brant and a big part of the fin root needs to glue to the tail cone. I have a couple of Estes kits with plastic engine retainers that need to be glued on. Up until now I've used 30 minute epoxy and I did a lot of roughening of the glue surface first.
I've had an idea for a long time to do this experiment. It is holding up my Black Brant so I decided to try to move forward with the experiment. I had the idea that maybe there is a glue that would stick well to the Estes plastic part and then epoxy would stick to it. I had some glue that is used to glue plastic vanes on polished aluminum arrows so I thought it would stick anything to anything. Unfortunately I dug my tube of this glue out and found it was dried out. I dug out other glues that I had, the first was an old tube of Shoe Goo. The others are old tubes of Testors plastic cement, the blue, orange and red varieties but again the orange tube was dried out. Surprisingly the blue tube still worked and you can imagine how old it is since the price tag says 33 cents. The piece of plastic is the discard from the transition that is used to make the tail cone for the Estes Bullpup. I roughened it up with sandpaper and put one dab each of shoe goo, Testors blue and Testors red on it. After that dried for several days I stuck on pieces of 1/8" square balsa with 30 minute epoxy including a fourth piece stuck directly to the plastic. I thought all of them would come off of the plastic but I was hoping that using the intermediary glue would gain some strength. The first one was the epoxy directly to plastic and it did snap clear of the plastic without a lot of strength. The other 3 all broke the balsa before failing the bond of the adhesives. In fairness some of them ended up with larger blobs of epoxy so they were gluing to slightly more surface area. I did not expect the balsa to break first. The lesson is to just put a coating of something on there that sticks to the plastic, let it dry, then epoxy the plastic piece on as normal.
I've had an idea for a long time to do this experiment. It is holding up my Black Brant so I decided to try to move forward with the experiment. I had the idea that maybe there is a glue that would stick well to the Estes plastic part and then epoxy would stick to it. I had some glue that is used to glue plastic vanes on polished aluminum arrows so I thought it would stick anything to anything. Unfortunately I dug my tube of this glue out and found it was dried out. I dug out other glues that I had, the first was an old tube of Shoe Goo. The others are old tubes of Testors plastic cement, the blue, orange and red varieties but again the orange tube was dried out. Surprisingly the blue tube still worked and you can imagine how old it is since the price tag says 33 cents. The piece of plastic is the discard from the transition that is used to make the tail cone for the Estes Bullpup. I roughened it up with sandpaper and put one dab each of shoe goo, Testors blue and Testors red on it. After that dried for several days I stuck on pieces of 1/8" square balsa with 30 minute epoxy including a fourth piece stuck directly to the plastic. I thought all of them would come off of the plastic but I was hoping that using the intermediary glue would gain some strength. The first one was the epoxy directly to plastic and it did snap clear of the plastic without a lot of strength. The other 3 all broke the balsa before failing the bond of the adhesives. In fairness some of them ended up with larger blobs of epoxy so they were gluing to slightly more surface area. I did not expect the balsa to break first. The lesson is to just put a coating of something on there that sticks to the plastic, let it dry, then epoxy the plastic piece on as normal.
