"Best glue for WF plastics?" Topic

I ordered 110 boxes of various WF plastics for my painting service. At least that is what I'm telling myself, but I'll probably nab them for myself.

Now I have to buy a serious amount of glue. I have superglue here. But I suppose some kind of plastic cement will be best.

There are many threads on which glue to use for plastics. Is there any consensus as regards the WF plastics?

Plastruct Plastic Weld?

If you can recommend a plastic please let me know where I can mail order it if you know. Also suggest how much I might need for 110 boxes! The War Store would be my preference as I can use this opportunity to load up on even more supplies.

Cheers

Neil
reinforcementsbypost.com

A liquid Polystyrene cement will work best. I suggest one with a brush applicator. I use Revel Contacta Liquid and am very happy with the results. There is a list of other brands on the WF packaging.

Mick

110 boxes??? Good grief…

I use one of the liquid cements which come in a dispenser with a hollow needle type thing. It's very good for dropping small amounts of glue very precisely (I'm a bit cackhanded to work unaided).

Brush is probably better if you're doing a lot and aren't an oaf.

Given you're after doing 4,000 figures, you may want to try looking for something available commercially in a larger quantity, and just use cheap paintbrushes to apply it.

And now I need to go have a lie down after just thinking about cutting 20,000 parts off sprues…

I've found the Ambroid ProWeld to work really well. The brush applicator is especially useful because you can brush over the join line between two parts (say a bare arm and a shoulder/torso) and "meld" the pieces together.

If your people are doing many GW figures, it should be a similar workflow.

GW? No Tony, we are on the WF band wagon.

Another vote for Revell Contacta professional. I prefer not to use the brush applicator as that requires a pretty well ventilated area (mine tended to evaporate with the large number of figs I was gluing and then I wondered why I had a stinking headache!). So I use the one with an applicator tube. It is superior to any other glues I've tried over the years.

Guy

I use Plastruct Plastic Weld. Works great on a majority of plastics. It's a proper plastic glue that melts the plastic at the joints which then fuse together as the glue dries.

Thanks for all the suggestions. This will be better than the stuff I used a couple of years ago. I had a tub of plastic cement left over for plumbing work. I checked it out and found that it caused cancer and was banned everywhere but Bangladesh.

>And now I need to go have a lie down after just thinking about cutting 20,000 parts off sprues…

Happy to say I'll only have to do a few figures from each type of figure. The lads will do the rest. I buttered them up today with a slap up Ifta (post fasting nosh). They were wondering why I'd bought them lots of soft drinks, desert, and posh grub. Little do they realise a container of plastic is headed their way.

Does one bottle of Plastruct/Revell Contacta professional/Ambroid ProWeld do one box of plastics?

Not an easy question since some plastic kits have 60 figures. But some people are quite good at answering this sort of question satisfactorily.

If you're doing lots of figures, maybe look at buying a can of MEK (Methyl Ethyl Ketone) and cutting int maybe 50% with alcohol (which IIRC is soluble). Testors Liquid Cement is in fact MEK.

Damon.

Does one bottle of Plastruct/Revell Contacta professional/Ambroid ProWeld do one box of plastics?

….I have not tried to measure this but I think that you will manage 2 or 3 boxes of figures per pot of glue.

Plastruct has actually 3 different glues for plastic.

Plastic Weld I believe is the strongest solvent because it melts different kinds of plastic to each other.

Weldene is a less strong solvent, it melds multiple types of plastics but only to the same type.

Bondene is for styrene only, for bonding styrene to styrene. It smells nice (like orange oil) and obviously is the least toxic. Probably evaporates slower too.

I have no experience with Wargames Factory plastics in particular; I'm surprised I don't see info about their kits on their web site. Anyway, most plastic model kits are styrene; odds are theirs are as well.

So I'd go with the Bondene: Made for the task, smells nice, and least toxic.

If you can't glue together at least three or four boxes of figs with a bottle of Platic Weld, or the other two from Plastruct, you are really doing something wrong!