Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post

Quote:

Originally Posted by tmacklin

Oatey's has a plumbing cement that has been formulated to work with ABS (and other plastics). I needed to make some repairs to both an Estes Nike Smoke and and Estes D-Region rockets that I acquired from a fellow who bailed out of the hobby. While his builds were very nice to look at he apparently used Testors plastic cement per the instructions (and very little at that), which resulted in fins that detached in flight or upon touchdown. After reading about bond failures with cements and epoxies, I tried the Oatey's cement which "welded" the parts together. It is messy to work with when used for model rockets so I used pipe cleaners dipped into the container to apply it. So far, so good.

Trimming all plastic parts of "flash" and pre-fitting parts is also helpful with these plastic components.

Is the Oatey plumbing cement that you used a two-part epoxy? The ones I've found online--and Oatey makes several interesting varieties that may be excellent for building rockets--are "unitary" cements that come in metal cans (see: https://www.google.com/#q=Oatey%27s+plumbing+cement ). Their PVC pipe glue, I'm guessing, cures to a hard rubber-like consistency, which would be ideal for rocket kit applications (one doesn't want a cement that's either brittle-rigid or like soft rubber, but instead one that's rigid with just a little "give," to handle in-flight vibration and landing impacts). Also:

The LOCTITE Epoxy Plastic Bonder, like the Oatey PVC pipe cement, also welds the two parts together, and it's also slightly flexible so that it "gives" a little with the parts (the typical gluing application shown on its blister card is the mending of a plastic deck, patio, or lawn chair). It contains methyl methacrylate. LOCTITE's 60 minute Extra Time epoxy contains polyamide, amorphous silica, and amine curing agents, and their 5 minute General Purpose epoxy contains polymer captan and amine curing agents, and both the 60 minute and 5 minute ones are not recommended for gluing flexible materials.