"How to avoid "silly string" when using hot glue?" Topic

I converted a 2nd Citadel Woods kit by adding my own foliage due to the awful flat leaf canopies that Citadel supplies with the kit. This time I used a Scenic Express product called Super Turf, over a framework of steel wool underneath that I painted brown.

But I decided I needed to use hot glue to attach the foliage, white glue doesn't dry fast enough and the foliage falls off the steel wool, plus white glue drips through onto the base below, it just doesn't work for this application. In addition, spray adhesive was just not strong enough to make the foliage stick effectively to steel wool.

However, in all my experiences using hot glue guns, I cannot seem to avoid producing the silly string that ends up clinging to everything you are working on. I was able to clean up a good deal of it, but there are still a lot of strings among the foliage.

Here's the results of the conversion. Came out pretty nice but the silly string was annoying;

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Those are some great trees. Well done!

Wow, those are great trees.

Wow.

Different guns have different temperatures and different glues act differently. Nothing for it but to get some craft sticks or something and start playing with it all and try different techniques.

You might try googling various other ways to describe "silly string", there are a *lot* of people using hot glue, someone has to have an answer – thought it may work for their gun/glue combination and not yours.

Good luck!

Wow, those are nice trees. I could never use them, they'd make my miniatures look shabby…

how to avoid:
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how to remove:
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I "wrap" the item around the nozzle of the glue gun to keep it from creating strings. Usually I leave the glue gun on the table, apply the glue (and then do a turn around the nozzle with the glued end), then move the object to the thing I am gluing it onto.

If I need to apply the glue to the object (since it is too large to handle by bringing the object to the glue gun) I will do a loop with the glue gun and that normally 'snips' the stringy bit.