The Little World

Not you, readers – I trust you implicitly. You have the sophisticated taste to read my essays and that’s good enough for me.

And not Kawanishi. I have seen their Emily flying boat and desire one inordinately. They have my full confidence.

It’s GSI Creos with their Mr Cement SPB that has me worried. I have just decided to trust the wings and fuselage to this solvent adhesive and await the result.

I’ve had the bottle for some time but always deferred to the thicker cement or the clear Mr Cement S for most assembly. Occasionally I’ve experimented with Revel Contacta or the tube of unknown goo that came with a Polish starter set. But finally the very fine seams on the Czech RS kit have tempted me to try it.

So far, so good. I have been careful to flood the thin seams with it to watch it track up by capillary action – the black dye allows you to see where it’s gone. The Norm has a very good fit to begin with and the cement doesn’t really have to bridge anything. Any minor gaps will get a super-gluing and that should be that.

I did experiment with a dyed cement before when I used commercial MEK to assemble some models. It did track well, marked the seams with red, and dried up in a reasonable time. But the health warnings about methyl-ethyl-ketone were worrying. This may seem ridiculous for a product that is sold in a DIY warehouse for pipe fitting…after all a plumber or retic man uses far more than I ever would. And it is not as if I have so many decades to live that I need get paranoid…

What I would really like to see in cements is something half-way in viscosity between the thing and the regular consistency. I may experiment with two half-bottles of the GSI cement to see if I can make a custom mixture to my own satisfaction. I am assuming that the materials of which the two varieties are made are similar.