whats the best bonding glue for balsa kits? tight bond wood glue? or c.a.? if ca thick or thin? thanks, dont mint waiting for tight bond to dry if its a stronger bond

Go with the TiteBond or Elmer's Carpenter's glue. CA joints are brittle and unpredictable, while aliphatic gives you resilience and consistency.

I only use CA for joints that don't matter. On an airplane, there aren't very many of those.

Roger

You might want to try one of the new polyurethane glues, Gorrila Glue is one of the brands, you can purchase it at Lowes or Home Depot. I used to use tight bond, recently I tried Gorrila Glue and I really like it. It seems expensive but when you see how little you use and the strength and the light weight and easy sanding you will probably like it. The instructions say to spray one of the surfaces with water to help it set up but I have found that this is not necessary with balsa. You will also find that this glue sets up much quicker than tight bond. Try it on some scrap before you use it on an airplane, it takes much less than you would think, I use a syringe to dispense this stuff.

P-47 D PILOT,

When it comes to glue, 'best' means different things to different people. For most of the people building models, best seems to mean fastest, which is to say CA. Generally, strength of the bond is not an issue, since all of the glues we use are able to make a bond stronger than the wood. If the joints aren't as tight as they could be, you may want a glue that fills gaps better. For me, toxicity and environmental impact are worth considering, so I use aliphatic resin whenever I can ( Tite-Bond or Tite-Bond II ). Aliphatic resin is strong enough for any joint on a model airplane, including gluing the wing halves together. For parts that get direct exposure to fuel, epoxy is a better choice. For parts that are just really difficult to clamp, CA is a better choice. Otherwise, it's Tite-Bond for me.

banktoturn

so using CA for almost everything and epoxy where needed is bad technique for building planes?

brschmid,

No, I think it's a great technique. I just prefer to use a more environmentally benign adhesive as much as possible, and I'm willing to take more time to do it.

banktoturn

ok thanks, i am guess i just don't have the patience. (it took like 150 hours to build my SD )

Epoxy where needed, CA everywhere else.

Any joint is best and strongest with zero gap, which ever glue you use, and it is easy to get zero gap with thin CA - put the two parts to gether, then add CA.

I hardly ever use thick CA any more, I use thin where two parts can be held together as it is applied, medium for every thing else. I only use thick where I need to do a large area, so don't want it to go off.

I want my planes to be rigid, not flexible, so the idea of ali glue being better because of this makes no sense to me. The only planes I have seen come apart have done so either because the ground got in the way, or because they were badly built, both of which is not glue type dependant but modeller ability dependant.

Ultimately, use which ever glue you are happy with. For me that is primarily CA.

Any of the alphatic resins with epoxy in some of the areas like engine mounts. I avoid CA's whenever possible, bad smell, brittle joints, expensive and almost impossible to sand. Alpihatics (like Titebond) are semiflexible and holds up under shock loads much better.

Don't forget old fashioned Ambroid. I had not used it for many years until recently when I tried a tube and rediscovered its virtues. Dries faster than Titebond (though not as fast as CA)
easy to sand and just enough flex not to be brittle.

Also the fast drying Testors cement is almost as fast as CA and is also easy to sand.

I generally will use several adhesives in construction of a model.