What adhesives do people use & whats the best ones?

[Henry Barker]

For most panels aluminium to aluminium we use 3M’s VHB tape we have a couple of different variations here depending on job, indoors or out.

I use 3M’s Scotch-Weld DP190 with gun and mixer nozzles, or Scotch Weld in tubes 2216 Contruction glue for glueing HDU panels and anything that you don’t want to fall apart.

For acrylic we use Altuglas Adhesive S36 a very fast and efficient glue provided by our sheet material stockist, it contains Dichloromethane, and softens your brain cells when you open the can 🙂

I don’t know if you have Casco (part of Akzo-Nobel) in the UK but they do a great glue for fixing polystyrene letters and such together or building large logos its called Super Set works fast and doesn’t melt the polystyrene.

[Paul Davenport]

For acrylic fabrication we use dichloromethane (neat) and tensol 12 or 70 or Altuglas p10 or s2000 (i think)

We also use Methyl ethyl ketone for some other Plastics

For foamalux we use tetrahydrafurhan or PVC adhesive

For heavy constructon of aluminiums, di-bonds etc we use Araldite and every now and again penloc

In addition to all these we also use sika-flex with 209 primer and 3m tapes

The DCM and THF are very hard to track down, The reasons for using tensols and the Altuglass equivilent range from the fact that Altuglass do not use DCM in their adhesives anymore which makes them less aggressive than the tensols, they are also more fluid which is good for sealing the insides of B/U letters.

The tensols seem far better for sticking and laminating of larger pieces of acrylic For example I have successfully laminated a number of 3000×2000 sheets of 12mm thick clear together with an almost optically clear lamination, involved about 15 bottles of tensol in a bucket and a bit of know how and a gas mask !!!!!

Hope that helps a bit