Can't glue with anything!!!

...try a solvent???

Ugh, polyethylene, probably. Nothing glues that stuff. OTOH, it's usually cheap stuff that's made of PE so it costs little to replace. I was in the same situation with my "baby scope" powered by 4 C cells. The holder cracked and a new one is 99 cents.

on

Polypropylene, maybe. There is an adhesive for polypropylene and polyethylene. Unfortunately, it's not widely available yet.

Googled "polyethylene polypropylene adhesive":

ought to tell you all you need to know

Tried any of the loctite products on it? The Loctite Bonding guides can be found at:

The new Loctite 3030 at the bottom of the page looks especially interesting.

Dan Thomas

"Brian" wrote in news:flmstb$onh$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:

construction adhesive (Liquid Nails)may work;let it fully cure before trying it out.

Screws, rivets, etc.

Tim

-- Deep Fryer: A very philosophical monk. Website @

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I'm an admin of the water-rockets list on Yahoo. Folk there use PL Premium construction adhesive (a polyurethane glue) to splice PETE soft-drink bottles together, and the results can withstand >120PSI. No other readily available glue comes even close, including all variants of Liquid Nails.

on

Low density polyethylene (LDPE), at slightly elevated temperatures (66C/115F) will dissolve in a number of common solvents. HDPE requires higher temperatures. If you have a HDPE battery holder, perhaps you could heat it in the oven or in boiling water, then quickly dry it off and swab some xylene on it -- it might get just hot enough for the xylene to attack the surface of the HDPE without deforming the item. Then use some adhesive. I don't know what would work, you could try plumbers' PVC cement or ordinary rubber cement, or cyanoacrylate, or DUCO. DUCO works for assembling plastic model airplanes. Of course, if you're just trying to fix a crack, the solvent alone might do it. I was thinking more along the lines of joining discrete parts.

Just speculation. I've never actually glued PE oe PP.

on

I suspect this is half the "fun" of Electrical Engineering...

Getting to dabble in Chemistry, trying to glue widget-A to widget-B. It can be very maddening, but once you stumble across the right glue, you "feel" like a genius!

To paraphrase that bald comedian whose name I can't remember right now (you know, the guy who smashes watermelons on-stage), you can always try the glue they use to stick Teflon to the pan.....

-mpm

xy on

One thing I found out about several years back is hot glue. That will=20 pretty much stick anything to anything.

The SO was doing huge project boards with heavy objects on them. Bolting=20 them through was one solution but a pain. That's when I found out about=20 hot glue.=20

D from BC

Not even RTV silicone? That stuff sticks to everything, to the point of being hard to scrape off. Well, I haven't tried it on poly or nylon yet, but heck - it sticks to GLASS!

If it's styrene or ABS, then any solvent-based cement should work.

Good Luck! Rich

Long thread in sci.chem re polyethylene/polyproplyene:

(or google this ... Very crudely, they have "little interest in sticking to anything" )

Ah, that's not true.. We have some chemicals at work that has some very strict environmental laws of handling on clean up let alone applying it. It bonds those plastics just like they were never apart!

very toxic..

y on

My first college roommate was the son of a Grumman engineer. He brought with him a tube of ugly brown industrial adhesive that he said was so good you couldn't buy it in stores. I thought that was unfair until the firt time I stuck my hand to the desk.

mpm wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@t1g2000pra.googlegroups.com:

Gallagher.

Actually polypropylene is one of the best thermoplastics to work with and it is very easy to form and weld. Of course if all you know is what's available in a supermarket aisle, it's not going to happen. Here's an industrial strength solution, but they won't sell to you and that is good, you need to go to a shop:

y on

The article says that Dow has come out with an adhesive that works on low-surface-energy plastics _at room temperature_. But the OP doesn't have to work at room temperature. One of the things we've learned in this thread is the importance of "surface energy." Plastics with low surface energy are very slick, the which makes them difficult to glue. Simply heating the item will alleviate the problem to a greater or lesser degree. It might make gluing it as easy as gluing PVC plumbing pipe. With PVC, you just swab a little solvent on the parts and apply the glue. I have some PVC primer and cement. Here are the ingredient lists

primer: tetrahydrofuran, methyl ethyl ketone, cyclohexanone, acetone cement: tetrahydrofuran, methyl ethyl ketone, cyclohexanone, polyvinyl chloride homopolymer

The cement is pretty much the same as the primer, with some PVC filler mixed in fill up the gap and seal the pipes.

This suggests an experiment. The OP could buy some cheap solvent such as acetone or PVC primer at the hardware store, put a couple of PP items in the oven and get them as hot as possible without deforming, swab them with solvent and stick them together with model airplane glue or pvc cement.

shop:

Sorry, but polypropylene is known for its chemical resistance. To include many solvents.

It gets used as containers in both chemical and pharma circles.

The weld suggestion is right. Find some similar media, form "straps with it, and "weld" the straps to the item in question. Viola.