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hi all,

for a batch of marines I'm working on, I decided to paint some of the bits separately, before assembling the whole model (arms, weapons, backpacks). am I going to run into any issues gluing these bits together later? I was planning on using loctite super glue rather than plastic glue. do I need to scrape the contact surfaces clean or anything?

cheers,

v

Supposedly it will stick better without paint at the contact points. Personally, I've never run into any problems with plastic glue or super glue.

Nah no issues. If you want you can run a hobby knife in an X across the surface, or give it a few passes with the file, before applying glue. Although you can probably get away with glue right over the paint.

what about clouding (whatever it's called when superglue makes a little cloudy-white halo around itself)? I've noticed that loctite does cloud a bit when it's directly on plastic. does it do the same thing on painted surfaces? (yes, I could easily test this but then I'd have to clean it up :p)

I use Loctite ultra control gel super glue and have no problems gluing pre-painted things together. Plastic glue has a hard time when stuff is painted though.

I've had no luck with plastic glue on painted areas. It's been fine with superglue.

In the future, I will be using blue tac to mask off the joint areas so I can use plastic glue.

That frosted effect is just the nature of the beast - if it does it on bare plastic, it'll do it on paint, as well. Different glues/conditions effect the presence and degree of clouding, though - even using the same glue, sometimes I get it and sometimes I don't.

Regarding the general issue, though, you can superglue painted parts together. It won't be as strong as a plastic-to-plastic join, since you're relying on the strength of the paint's adhesion, as well as the glue (a popped join will rarely be the result of glue failure - you'll more likely see a bare spot on one side of the break and paint+glue on the other).

Personally, I tend to mask off surfaces to be glued with poster tack or file a spot bare before attaching, whether I'm using CA or plastic glue, just to be on the safe side.

While the join won't be as strong, depending on what you're doing it's usually adequate. For a backpack or a shoulder pad where there is a large amount of surface area and little torque, you should be fine. For an arm join or something like that, I strongly recommend you take the edge of your knife and scrape some of the paint off the target surfaces. Scoring a X or hashes is really only needed, in my opinion, for areas that are load bearing and in that case a pin is usually required anyway.

The adequate-but-removable quality of painted surface glued to painted surface can also be to your advantage. I like to glue my minis to temporary bases by only one foot for painting, and then when they're done, I rebase them onto seperately-done bases. A little twist and they pop right off, since I reuse my temp bases and they always have some paint on them from a previous project.

Ouze wrote:The adequate-but-removable quality of painted surface glued to painted surface can also be to your advantage. I like to glue my minis to temporary bases by only one foot for painting, and then when they're done, I rebase them onto seperately-done bases. A little twist and they pop right off, since I reuse my temp bases and they always have some paint on them from a previous project.

That's a neat trick. I'm going to start painting the model off the base so I can paint the base separately and was trying to think of ways of securing the model well but still be temporary. Thanks!