Wether you are scratch building, modding, or repairing, hot glue is your best friend. It's cheap and reliable. We use it for pretty much everything here at Flite Test.
Here's some advice for choosing your glue, applying it, and even ways to remove it.
Most modern glue guns come with high temp or low temp settings. One gun that Josh really likes is the Ad Tech Pro200.
When it comes to foamboard you want to be careful that your glue gun doesn't get so hot that it makes the glue boil. This will warp the foam. On the opposite end, you don't want your glue to cool before you finish your bond.
We recommend using multi-temp glue sticks on a high temp setting.
Speaking of glue sticks, we had a run in with a bad batch recently. If you are going to look for sticks make sure you keep an eye open for the foggy, opaque sticks.
These, for whatever reason, took too long to dry, and when they did the result wasn't very solid. The cool part is that once Ad Tech heard about this they made the effort to contact us and fix the problem.
They sent us a ton of sample sticks all with different formulas. Once we figure out which is the best for scratch building we will let you know what made the cut!
One problem you may run into is running low on a stick while you have a large surface to bond.
You can always put a new stick in but it isn't secured in the body of the gun until the first stick is pushed through.
If you tilt the gun at a weird angle it will more than likely just fall out.
The easy fix is to use the heat from the guns metal tip and melt the end of the stick slightly.
Then when you but it up to the original stick, it was adhere to it making one giant Franken-stick! Problem solved.
If you are planing on Minwaxing Your Plane or if you just want to get the longest life out of your builds, you can seal the edges of your plane.
All you need to do is cut a small notch in a scrap piece of foam the same width of the edge.
Run a small bead of glue down the edge you wish to seal...
...place the notch over the edge...
...and scrape off the excess. This will drive the glue into the edge and seal it, preventing the paper from peeling.
Now that you know how to apply the glue, what if you need to remove it?
The easy method is fighting fire with fire! Not literally. You use heat to apply the glue and you can also use heat to remove it.
! WARNING !
DO NOT USE THIS METHOD ON FOAM!
If you have components that don't mind getting a little warm, like plywood, metal, (basically things that don't melt) you can use a heat gun to re-melt the glue.
If you do need to remove glue from surfaces you don't want to catch on fire, a really cool trick is to use denatured alcohol!
Here is a bunch of random stuff hot glued to a microwave!
Here is a pipette full of denatured alcohol!
SCIENCE!
The alcohol separates the glue from the surface without damaging a thing.
A more practical example would be removing a board from a multirotor.
The glue peels away like it forgot how to glue!
We hope that these tricks help you get more out of your glue. If you have any cool hot glue tricks leave them in the comments below!
