Not Just Glue—Three Unique Adhesives
From a faster cure to a better dispenser, products from Titebond, Loctite, and Gorilla provide innovative alternatives to your average adhesives.
Think of products indispensable to a carpenter, and in that list, you’re bound to find glue. It’s no fluke that adhesive brands often call their products wood or carpenter’s glue. So, let’s look at few innovative products that take the category beyond the white stuff we used at school.
The one drawback of glue in the debate between adhesives and nails is the time required to establish a chemical bond. Glues provide strong, permanent adhesion, but they often need clamps to hold pieces in place while you wait until the glue sets. Enter Tightbond’s Instant Bond Wood Adhesive Gel. Used with the activator, the glue gives you 30 seconds of handling time, has a 20-second set time, and takes 60 seconds to cure. Used without the activator, the time doubles. Designed specifically for wood products, the viscous gel works like a chemical clamp for quickly bonding difficult-to-clamp shapes and preassembling moldings, such as door and windows casings, to install as a single unit. The 2-oz. option is available for around $15.
Sometimes, glue comes out of the tube in big sloppy globs that make it difficult to do fine work, such as applying a little dot of adhesive to install a decorative applique for a cabinet door. To glue the finer things, Loctite has introduced Power Grab Ultimate, a high-tack, multisubstrate adhesive. The innovation comes with the dispenser, a pre-dosed mounting applicator that metes out a single dot of adhesive with each click. Two clicks will hold 2 lb. instantly and 44 lb. after full cure. A 9-oz. tube is just over $11.
Glue manufacturers have paid little attention to the aesthetic characteristics of their products. Visible glue lines can spoil a clean joint. And when the glue oozes out inadvertently, it can ruin an adjacent surface. We all know the Gorilla brand for its muscular adhesives. Now you can add invisibility to this adhesive superhero. The company’s new caulk-cartridge dispensable Max Strength Clear blends their strongest adhesive into a crystal-clear bead that is paintable, VOC-compliant, and non-foaming, and that works even underwater. A 9-oz. bottle is $13.
Photo: Rodney Diaz
From Fine Homebuilding #303
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