It is made by DAP with the brand name Weldwood. It is a liquid that comes in a small can with a brush. You brush some glue on each surface, then wait 15 minutes for it to air-cure before mating the two pieces.
I am doing a test similar to the test devised by Bill Korsgard. Last night I suspended a 4.5 lb vise from the test joint, and it was still holding this morning, 10 hours later. So I added a 2.5 lb weight (total 7 lb), and it was still holding after another 2 hours. The surface area of the joint is 1 inch by 3/4 inch. I then attempted to peel the pieces apart at the corners, with severe twisting, and was able to do it, but it took a fair amount of force.
Prior to the test, I also did some twisting of the joint to see if it would peel apart, but it obviously survived.
Contact Cement is a little tricky to use, because you have to make sure that the pieces are aligned correctly as soon as they touch. You can’t re-position anything.
Just to join the happy band of rig testers - last night I cut up a PET drinks bottle and produced a test sample.
The sample was made up of 2 pieces 3 & 1/2 inches long and 1 inch wide which were roughed up for 1 inch at one end of each with wire wool just to take the gloss off. This was then wiped over with a water damped cloth to remove the dust.
I then coated the prepared area with a thin layer of Evode’s Stick Like Sh*t and pressed to two halves together with just my fingers until I could see that I had a uniform 1 sq inch of bond area. I then left this for 24 hours to cure.
To test the join I clamped the free ends of the test piece with an engineer’s clamp and a Mole wrench and pulled with a spring balance so that I put the joint into shear, not unlike Bill Korsgard’s method but without the creep capability.
I held the balance at 14 lbf for about 15 seconds and repeated this about 4 times. If I wasn’t such a wimp I would have held the load for longer, so as it stands I have no creep data. However, I tried to imagine what would happen to my 1/16 inch balsa Footy if I tried to pull it apart and concluded that it would take a lot less than 14 lbf.
So there you go. Sticks Like Sh*t is readily available in the U.K. , claims to be both waterproof and to also bond to a wet surface and is used by Roger Stollery in his Bugs - so what more do you want
Unfortunately, Sticks-like-Sh*t appears to be an English product, and I have not found it on this side of the Atlantic (or more specifically, in New Jersey). Perhaps it is available under a different name.
Sticks like S**t is a product of Evo-stik. They have an American subsidiary Bostik-US whose website is www.bostik-us.com . SLS*t is not listed in the US catalogue but I suspect itmay be (more or less) the same thing as Bostik Heavy Duty Adhesive.
I had cut my test pieces circumferentially which meant they had a slight curve on them. O.K. I now realise this was a bit stupid but I thought there would be enough flexibility for the curve not to matter.
This was clearly not the case as after 30 minutes at 14 lbf the test piece had unbonded for about 1/2 its length because of the peeling effect of the curve meaning it was no longer in pure shear. However, no creep had taken place insomuch as the two pieces had not moved relative to each other. The interesting thing was that the remaining join held on for another 45 minutes before total failure.
So, 1 sq inch at 14 lbf in shear lasted for 1 hour 15 minutes - good enough for a Footy I would have thought.
To be a bit more scientific I have today prepared 2 more test pieces, both cut longitudinally, one with abraded surfaces and the other just the plain gloss finish. I’ll post the results on completion.
Actually, Evo-Stik appears to be a brand under Bostik, which is actually a French company. Details at http://www.bostik.com/history.htm for those of you with an interest in corporate machinations.
In any case I tracked down the Evo-Stik contact page and asked them if Sticks Like Sh*t is available in the US and if so, under what name. We’ll see.
Okay, I must have missed something here. Why has so much effort been applied to gluing segments of soda bottles together? The plastic material is inherently flimsy, it only really holds its shape while the contents are under pressure. It also de-laminates upon sharp impact. It doesn’t puncture readily, but then there are a lot of other materials that share that same feature but come in appropriate lengths to build a Footy with and are easier to bond. The plastic from soda bottles does heat form, but not as well as several other plastics.
So is it the recycled bottles that is the allure? The brownie points gained for using a recycled material are far out weighed by the chemical adhesives you guys are dabbling with. You also lose on the environmental consciousness front by using those throw-away lithium Energizer batteries to power your bottle-boats.
I previously pointed out that those soda/pop bottles are not free as we get a 10¢ return for each bottle here in Michigan. So, it must not be an issue of being cheap.
There is a TV commercial here in the USA where sticks of an adhesive are kneeded/worked like a 2 part epoxy and claims that it sticks to anything including fixing water leaks in a glass/pipes???
Anyonw tried this stuff?
Next time I see the commercail, I will have to catch the name.
Regarding your email enquiry for Sticks Like Sh*t. This isn’t available
in the US, although there is an MS Polymer based material that Bostik USA
sell but under a different name. You can contact Bostik USA by Tel :
0014147748071 or Fax : 0014147748075.
I hope this helps.
Kind regards
Emma Burton
Intercompany, Glazing & Idenden Sales Co-ordinator
Bostik Ltd
Common Road
Stafford
The longitudinally cut specimen tests are complete.
The unprepared glossy finish specimen survived 5 hours at 16 lbf, but then failed instantly when the load was increased to about 25 lbf. The glue stripped off one surface leaving it perfectly clean.
The roughed up specimen survived 5 hours at about 21 lbf. It then did not fail when the load was increased to 30 lbf on the scale nor when I just pulled several times as hard as I could which could have been up to 40 lbf.
Neil.
I think the reason for a bottle boat Footy comes from when a group of us saw Peter Stollery’s IOM (?) bottle boat at Bourneville earlier this year. Its agility and acceleration were quite spectacular. This is all Andrewh needed as a catalist and off he went on one of his unconventional design projects.
I don’t think Andrewh does have too much time on his hands, he just seems to be able to get more use out of 24 hours than the rest of us.
For all his wacky ideas we luv 'im to bits. Just ask him about his “Sloice” one day
Neil, I seem to have missed your last effort until Trevor referred to it.
Lemonade bottles are not a bad material for more than just Stollery-type boyttle boats. As I type I am looiking at GRR 171 Mandeln i groten. This is a hot formed hull made from a cider bottle forward and a leminade bottle aft. She was built for me by Andrew Halstead (AndrewH) in very short order indeed.
The technique does have its disadvantages - mainly that the material does not take paint easily so you end up with a see-thre boat that is incredibly difficut to sew! However, it also has geat virtues. It is possible to produce a hull over a relatively simple male mould with very low eeight (be careful in the choice of bottle) and an excellent surface finish. Panel stiffness of Mandeln in groten is about the same as that of Moonshadow.
Unless Andrew has done something I don’t know about, I think Mandeln i groten is the only one of her kind. I have not actually seen the building process ut it strikes me that, if my understanding is right, it is an excellent way of producing short production run hulls of very high quality without the skills of superman (no Mr. Halstead, I’m not knocking your skills as a craftsman but I think that this time the genius was in the conception rather than the execution).
Afinal point. As I have argued strongly (pun intended) in the past, one of the problems with a Footy is avoiding over engineering. Quite apart from anything else, part of the difficulty stems from producing a boat that is capable of standing up to being handled by its proud owner - the sailing loads are trivial in comparison. The extrme toughness of PET bottles means that some at least of the routes to owner-driven destruction are eliminated. The stuff is almost impossible to puncture.
What really is pleasing - and I am probaly going to embarass sme very good friends for the second time in 24 hours - is that the Footy class in the UK has attracted some extremely clever engineers who in their own individual ways are quite rapidly changing the way that we (at least) think about Footys. 12-months ago Brett McCormack’s build of my Moonshadow attracted gasps of amazement wherever she went - and rightly so. Now those gasps are reserved for Gary Sanderson’s Thintrekker whose displacement on the starting line is substantially below 300 g. Even if Brett has moved on since Moonshadow, I am sure the gap is closing.
Angus, I too have one of Andrew H’s hulls that he was kind enough to send to me knowing that i have a very keen interest in bottle boats.
I have been waiting for a glue to rear its ugly head from the plethora of testers in this thread so that i can glue the two halves together.
Well i am pleased to tell you that Lawrence Hartley (one of our newest members) seems to have found the answer.
Last Sunday morning when i picked him up to go to the Cotswold meeting he very proudly tried to demonstrate pulling a bottle apart that he had used Stablit Express on - I have to say it was very impressive.
I have asked Lawrence to carry out a 1 inch sheer test to assertain what he has found - I hope he will be along shortly to report his findings
What a good and resourceful bunch you all are! Thank you everyone who contributed, tested, researched and shared:D
I am scottish by birth, and having discovered that there is somewhere in the world that I can get money back on pop bottles i can no longer consider them as a free resource!
Attempting summary at this point in time:
PET bottles are readily available, and can be used as “bottles” or can be heat shrunk into boat shapes.
They can be stuck together using;
[ul]
[li]Sticky tape (electrical insulating tape)
[/li][li]Double sided tape
[/li][li]Hot melt adhesive (I have a cunning way to do this - and will write it down if I remember)
[/li][li]Stabilit Express (thank you Lawrence)
[/li][li]Sticks Like S**t (thanks, Trevor and Andyt)
[/li][li]Silicone gasket RTV (it was the first tube my hand fell onto in the drawer)
[/li][/ul]
Before even THINKING about sticking bits of PET rough up the surfaces to be stuck with clean abrasive!
(I would wipe the rough surfaces with a strong degreaser (alcohol, acetone lighter fuel, or cellulose thinners))
Angus, sorry mate, cannot rectify the difficulty of sewing PET, and the last thing we want is to have rows of tricoteuses aroung the lake.
Hot melt cunning method. (hmg=hot melt glue)
My mini-hot melt gun has a silicone nozzle with the 1mm approx hole - it makes a bead about 1mm dia, therefore. To join two half hulls, for example, allow about 3mm overlap (abrade and degrease).
lay a bead of hmg on the outside of the inside part
Allow to cool as is or flatten the bead while it cools with a bit of scrap
When the hmg is cool and not sticky lay the second part in place and melt the glue through the the outer part with an iron (a heat shrink covering iron would be ideal, but a household iron suffices). The iron I used was set at polyester heat, incidentally (PET is a polyester). The hull parts did not shrink any more from the iron heat.
More as it happens - I tentatively aim to (shamelessly) copy Gary’s Duck in pop bottles (the shape is ideal).
Actually I suspect that what I really need to copy is Gary’s thumbs, since they are doing the controlling! Count them each time you attend a meeting, me old china!
andrew
Lots of interest seems to have been created so I have done some more tests.
It was not possible to pull the bottle I glued apart vertically using my physical strength. I needed to break it to test 1" square areas. A very,very sudden strong twisting motion on both halves of the bottle was able to eventually break the bond. It would be very unlikley that this amount of turning force would ever be experienced on a footy.
In search of perfection a method was needed to stop the joint rotating and thereby get an even stronger bond. I have come up with a way of attaching the two halves of the bottles together which does not allow the bottle to twist. I can report that this method of interlocking works even better. I’m going to show another member what I have come up with before posting any further. I need to have had my latest attempt verified and tested more scientifically. I will post the results.
