The Little World

Dinner for one can be a difficult affair if you are your own cook. You rarely make all the trimmings of anything and frequently steer round the things that are good for you in favour of the things that are easy to make.

Shopping for one is similarly fraught – particularly if you have come from a situation where you needed to cook for a number of people. The quantities in which some groceries are sold mean that you’d just never get a chance to buy them, let alone use them. Everything is too big.

In the hobby shop the same thing seems to occur at the adhesives and fillers rack. Up until now I have always bought cyanoacrylate glues based upon the viscosity; gap filling, thin, or extra-thin. The packaging, however, has been uniform – a small oviod bottle with a plastic nozzle and cover. The nature of the cement is such that the nozzle blocks pretty soon and the protective plastic hood then doesn’t fit. Air and water vapour get into the cement and the bottle is wasted. Coleman’s mustard again…

In an effort to avoid this I have been experimenting with different delivery systems for this useful cement. Note that I still use the solvent cements in various viscosities for my primary adhesives, but the CA cement is good for landing gear, gear doors, and the various antennae at the end of a build. I quite like it.

So far I have discovered that cheap CA from no-name Chinese brands is rubbish. It doesn’t set consistently and can even be dead in the tube. So far the best compromise is a Bostick product in a small 5ml squeeze tube. The plastic nozzle can still clog, but does so more cleanly than the Zap bottles. A pin pushed through the plastic blockage opens it again and away you go. The initial investment price is a lot less too, though I suspect the cost per ml is much higher.

I have yet to observe the frosting and gassing off that Zap can do on clear parts.