The video you're about to watch has
been made possible by KiwiCo, who you might remember when I built their beautiful
ukulele. They make a host of different kits all to introduce kids to the wonder of STEAM
— that is science, technology, engineering, arts and math — and there'll be more on that
later. But right now let's get into the video. Hey guys, Adam Savage here in my cave with a tool
tip that is not just a specific single tool, it is more like a process tip and I'm going to talk
today about glue. I build a lot of things in this shop.
I build a lot of stuff on this bench and I
do a lot of things that are radically different. One day I might make a robot, the next day I
might make a piece of clothing but one commonality through almost everything that passes through this
shop is that I end up using some kind of CA glue. CA stands for cyanoacrylate and you might have
first heard about it as a glue called crazy glue which is a very common form of cyanoacrylate
glue.
There are many different brands. I don't know what's different about them. In
my experience they all work roughly the same. I don't notice anything specifically new about
them. I have heard there is a flexible CA glue. I have not yet used it, which seems weird except
as a maker you get stuck in your ways. You get you get lodged in the way you like to do things.
And I love talking about how much I hate glue but the fact is is that I do hate glue. I think
it's the worst solution to any problem unless it's the only solution but CA glue holds a special
place in my heart as the perfect glue of the ADHD afflicted. I was never officially diagnosed but
I'm pretty sure I would have been diagnosed as ADHD. I want that result, man! So I'm going to
talk about CA glues. I'm going to talk about how I use them, how they work and there are ways
to make them work extra fast for you, i.e you can accelerate their setting, and I've got some
accelerants to talk about as well.
Oh also … Again there's a dizzying array of CA glues
with different properties. There's thick, there's thin, there's medium, there's flexible,
there's probably i think there are even um like acrylic safe because if you try and use it
with the clear um with the clear acrylic it can tend to fog that acrylic really ruin your
night um but uh i am just gonna talk about uh fixie glue and thin ca glue here just just two
types i can see that that was almost clogged um fins thin crazy glue is a horror movie about
glue things get off the rails really quickly with thin crazy glue and i can't wait to tell you
about it but we're gonna start with the medium um this is my bread and butter this is like this is
the hammer of my glues it is the most rudimentary and there's probably a little bit of this on every
single thing i have built over the past 30 years uh i wish i could buy this in
smaller bottles um these uh zap car which is one of the brands sells
uh their ca glue and i think these are 2.25 i think they sell them in like half ounce
bottles um really small and there's a reason that i like to buy my ca glue in small
bottles because it runs out it wears out it dries out even though the interface between
this and the open air is just this tiny you can hear it wheezing there that's like you
know that's that's literally like a hat pins width but over time this glue will get thicker
and thicker as it's exposed to the air even through that little hole and it'll eventually
become useless uh i used to buy it in these big terrines and that was just ridiculous
this is sort of a happy medium literally um so the medium is the thing i go to all the time
now let's talk about accelerating uh a medium siegel i've got some styrene here and i'm going to
use it to show you um just how quickly you can get things going with this so i just made two scores
i'm using this very thin what is this 20 thousand 30 thou all right so i was off by a little bit um so let's do oh here's a nice demo
here's what we'll do okay so uh the first accelerant i ever used was this uh this
is insta-set but there was another brand of a spritz called zip kicker and frankly i think
that's what we all called it we called every version of this zip kicker at industrial light
magic oh some people love that smell some people hate that smell some people are allergic to that
smell i am one of those people who loves it it's like a perfume that smells like work to me um so
here's how the uh here's how the accelerant works i'm just going to put down a dotted glue here
and a dotted glue there and i'm going to angle this so i can touch it with bosa here we go oink
doing now if i wanted to leave that alone i'd have to wait here for a little while i know ca glue is
legendary for its fast set but fast set means like within a minute or two and when you're holding
something that is like an eternity so watch this i just a little a little bit of this aerosolized
into the air i'm talking now what 10 seconds 11 12 13 14 15 and there you go so yeah
right it's magic it's science fiction it is sadly not a super durable joint it is also a
brittle joint uh which is why i'm interested in the flexible siege that's not going to happen
in this video but i will be experimenting with it um you have to be prepared that this is effective
this is a a chemical reaction that yields solid acrylic solid acrylic um from what i understand
and acrylic is brittle it can shatter and so can uh ca glue joints and i'll show you here
we go yeah you heard that um here let's say yeah you heard that snap okay so that is
that's the basic zip kicker accelerant and lately there is a totally new
kind that i have learned about which is this stuff 2p10 activator and they sell
ca glue as well for this but i wasn't tricked by them into purchasing both halves of the equation
figuring this would work on any ca glue and reader i was right this works on all the glues that
i have so we're gonna do the same thing again same experiment again and uh except i'm gonna use
this accelerator and you just get to see it work with accelerator less is usually more you usually
don't need to like do that kind of thing also this stuff doesn't smell very much at all so i'm
a little sad about that but that's fine it's probably better in the long run so oh right
i want to cut off the ends of this just a sec just so i don't have a residual accelerant so i've got my two dots of glue i put down
my my loop here and it's resting in both dots and just like i did with the other accelerant
and i really like this little needle tip oh oh oh that's not something i realized before
this weakens styrene oh well that's kind of a deal breaker isn't it okay let's solidify that
thing does it really weaken so it did it just um all right let's let's check
this out i put it under some stress yeah i i can feel yeah see that yeah it's um
it negatively it negatively affects the polymer uh chains inside the styrene um that's good
to know i wonder if the zip kicker does no the zip here does not seem to be
affecting the staggering negatively um back before the very first robot wars in 1993
um jamie and i and our our team at m5 was building blendo the very first of the centrifugal killer
robots and the best one and um it's a ridiculously long story i won't tell but uh in order to
steer it i had to see two lights inside the top of the engine of blendo in order to see those two
lights we cut out a one foot diameter hole in the armored walk that was his shell and we put in a
polycarbonate window which we had slumped formed on our vacuformer what we didn't realize
was that slump forming the polycarbonate added all these internal stresses to the plastic
and there was this point in which we hid it with ca glue oh sorry we hit it with zip kicker and
the whole thing shattered right in front of us like it was amazing um so uh this which we've
just determined and i didn't know this uh uh weakens styrene bonds or weakens styrene uh this
definitely not to be used on polycarbonate um i've been using this on styrene and haven't noticed
this before i don't tend to do glue joints that require me to hold something in tension like that
so that's just my way of saying you could still use this on styrene just slowly and carefully and
maybe a little less i said that some people like the smell of zip kicker and some people don't and
some people are allergic to it this is really true i i've worked in a lot of shops and in some of
them there were people who had a sensitivity to it and became physically ill at the smell of this
what will they do well reader there is a solution for those people too and it is humble baking
soda which is maybe my favorite accelerator for ca glue seriously just baking soda watch
this um and i'm gonna there we go let's put um the knot there and uh so i'm
gonna put this in the dot and i'm gonna sprinkle a little bit of baking
soda on both sides of the equation there we go basically just as fast but but there's this added bonus one is that the room
smells like baking soda when you blow on it like that but two is let's say uh this happens
all the time i'll make a model and i'll want the shell of it to actually be structurally sound
if i want to do that normally i am using a weld bond but perhaps i've got to glue some things
to the styrene that there's not a weld bond for this is the kind of accelerator i'll
use because the accelerator itself can act as a gusset so you see how i've
got some fluid in that corner there when i sprinkle this on top
of there what i end up with is an actual dimensional gusset it's it's
yeah um and this can be actually quite strong here i'm going to do another
drop here on the other side and then once this sets we're going to break it
i'll show you how strong it can be um but it's not necessarily that it's a particularly
hardy bond but what i've done is i've increased the surface area of the bond so it doesn't
matter if it's weaker or stronger there's more of it thus it is a stronger joint
um now let's see here if i touch this is it set sometimes uh it takes a while
for the baking soda's chemical reaction with the ca glue to reach the inside
of a glue dot but um yeah all right see that look at that that is way more
force than i would have been able to put on yeah this this is the secret to take away from this
video this right here can change your o and ho and z scale train modeling and
allow you to add some structural details to things and make them stronger uh i
swear like half of the things i built at ilm had internal gussets of baking soda
soaked uh ca glue because i loved it so much uh and you can make some fairly robust
stuff this way yep let's try and break it that the this broke before the bond.
Oh! Yeah.
Oh! There. I believe that's the encomium I was hoping to show about how excellent baking
soda is as an accelerant and it doesn't yield any smells or acids or anything that
makes your eyes water. It's terrific. As I said at the top of this video it is brought
to you by KiwiCo but you might be wondering to yourself, Who is KiwiCo? Well, they designed
and made this ukulele that I built as a One Day Build but they do so much more than that. KiwiCo
builds kits like this for kids to teach them the fundamentals of innovation, creativity and problem
solving and they have them batched into eight different subscription crates for kids from
ages 0 all the way to 104. And as one of the people who built their kits I found the design and
execution of this ukulele to be really pleasurable to construct. The instructions were clear, the
parts were well finished and easy to handle, but even more than that they do something I
particularly like which is everything you need to do a build is already in the box.
I know
that sounds like doesn't everybody do that? But no everybody doesn't do that. What you can be
guaranteed with KiwiCo is that there's no running around town for some special piece of wire or some
glue you've never heard of. If it's necessary it's included in the box. These two other kits,
the air hockey table and the planetarium, two other builds that became very popular after
Tested started airing this One Day Build. Like I said KiwiCo has eight different subscription
crates and of course no sponsored video would be replete without the offer and this offer is quite
generous. If you go to the URLl kiwico.com/tested you can get 50% off your first month of any one
of KiwiCo's crates.
That is kiwico.com/tested to get 50% off your first month of any of
their crates. Let's get back to the video. I said that I was going to talk about two kinds
of glue and i've just talked about the medium and like i said i i've used the thick i've
used the medium there are many different grades i kind of always know what i'm going for some
people put needle applicators or long applicator tips on their medium glue i tend not to because
that's not how i use it however with thin ca glue a thin tip is absolutely critical so let's talk
about thin ca glue um let me clear my workspace okay let's say for the sake of the argument that
you are working on a model and you want to glue this detail to this piece and they're
two totally different kinds of materials this is an excellent excellent use case for thin
ca glue but thin ca glue comes with a warning and you got to be really really careful
with it this is how to glue this is the stuff that will glue your fingers together it
will glue to your glue you to your creation it will glue you to your table it will glue you to
everything because it is so thin it is literally it seems to be about as thin as water it flashes
super quick which means it sets super quick so you might put a bit on the table and put your
finger oh and now your fingers glued to the table i swear to god i've glued my fingers
more times than i can count with this stuff and i have ruined hero props more than once by
a misapplication of thin ca glue but i want to show it under its most optimal circumstances
so if i use the medium and laid this out when i put this down it would squeeze out i'd end
up with all this extra stuff and i don't want that i want a really nice thin piece so uh i would in
this case take oh okay so it's like half clogs okay so i am going to squeeze it a little
bit before i turn it over and that puts a little bit of negative pressure in
the bottle and that is really critical so as i do this i'm going to lay it down and
i'm going to lay down a bead of it no it is not yep there we go okay now i lay
this down on top of that bead oh okay that was that was less spectacular than i
was hoping frankly didn't mean for that business um so those two are joined that is
literally you rarely need accelerant with thin ca glue and frankly you don't want to
use it because it can tend to cause it to um harden and crackle and do some weird
things um but right there is just a first pass at the power of thin ca glue like i
just touched it and it was joined which means the stakes are high right you you don't
want to get that wrong and i'm now even just this few seconds after that as i'm trying
to break this off yeah you can see it's you know it's doable it's not pleasant oh oh there we
go so a thin ca glue is i think in my opinion rarely a structural glue um it is much
more for surface details like that um but even what i did here of like putting my finger
down on it is a great way to glue your fingers to the piece because okay the legend is actually
true ca glue was originally designed as a as a field wound dress so it is a glue formulated
to kick in the presence of human skin seriously that's why it glues you so effectively
it uh it is pretty much the the the beating heart and lifeblood of the special effects model making
industry and has been since it was introduced to the model making industry and i know how that
happened yeah because the origin story is known uh lauren peterson one of the original model
makers on star wars and every other star wars movie you know one wonderful model maker an
incredible artist and a good friend of mine discovered ca glue after star wars so all of star
wars was done apparently with five-minute epoxy but lauren just found out that eastman kodak
had this stuff you could buy it in these brown bottles so it wasn't exposed to the light and he
bought this pint of ca glue and brought it in to industrial light magic lorne is the origin story
of why we use it in the special effects industry that is cool to know when and where that happened
um so like i said it was developed as a field dressing it is made for gluing your skin you've
got to be super super careful it also runs so you get a little bit on here and you'll
just watch how quickly look at that it runs now not only does it run but because it's
so thin it wicks it wicks so just as you've seen stuff like surface tension pulls liquid up up
a thing or against the force of gravity a thin ca glue can totally do that and literally just
pushing it there now i've said it right like that's again how quickly it flashes so there are
small cases in which this is the best stuff in the world and most cases in which it is simply
a liability i tend to stay away from this unless i absolutely need it i don't know why i have two
open bottles right now that's kind of crazy to me if you use ca glue i would never attempt to use
this thin ca glue in this bottle with just that applicator tip that's like a garden hose for it
so i have a collection of little thin add-on tips and i use them almost disposably simply because
when you use accelerant anywhere near this it's in the air it's also kind of semi-kicking
the polymer chains inside the glue so that exposure you tend to uh it tends to be
best practice to store your zip kicker not next to your ca glue in your toolbox they yeah
you see you get what i'm saying right this can and this yeah you don't want that you
want them separated by a little bit baking soda the aerosolized and the
spritz bottle the sick and the thin yep i know that maybe somebody is out there thinking
why don't you buy small bottles and decant it something tells me that after i decanted a
bunch of small bottles they'd all be sort of compromised in some way or they would
kick off i haven't yet done that like i said my preferred size is about a third
of this for the amount i'd like to buy my ca glue in but i currently at this moment in time
seem to be stuck at the two and a half ounce amount i love this stuff like i said i've used it
on almost everything i have built over the last 40 years i've been making stuff um i appreciate
you joining me for this tool tip i hope this is useful to you and if you've got some special
tips or extra accelerators for ca glue that you'd like to reveal talk about them in
the comments um two other things that you can do you can blow on a ca glue joint your
breath the co2 in your breath helps kick it uh and also my my my mentor mitch romanowski
was an inveterate smoker like legendary smoker and mitch uh used to say that cigarette smoke
kicked ca glue but i think that was just mitch being opportunistic and i think he probably would
have agreed mitch is no longer with us but he is with us thank you guys for joining me for this
duel tip stay safe and i will see you next time