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Good morning fellow dakka'ites, quick questiom, interested in using old prescription medicine bottles for some kila kan conversions but am unable to find a glue that will work on them, does anyone have any experience with these and can give me some advice? It would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

Fairly certain two part epoxy like Araldite will work. Though I'm surprised super-glue isn't adequate. Give them a good soak and a wash in in soapy water before you try to glue them, and make sure your super glue isn't out of date.

Indeed - aquick wash and dry, and rough up the contact surface with knife scoring or sandpaper for extra grip, and superglue should work.

Araldite sticks to nearly anything, hot glue could also be an option.

If you find it really won't stick, try making a small hole and use greenstuff/araldite/hot glue from both sides (basically making a plug that's held in by the sides, instead of stickiness).

 Smacks wrote:
Fairly certain two part epoxy like Araldite will work. Though I'm surprised super-glue isn't adequate. Give them a good soak and a wash in in soapy water before you try to glue them, and make sure your super glue isn't out of date.

If they're polyethylene bottles, regular epoxy won't work well either. There's actually very little that does a good job of bonding polyethylene or polypropylene. They have very low surface energy which means there's very little chemical bonding going on.

I haven't tried any of them, but several companies make structural adhesives designed for those sorts of polymers. There's something like this...

http://www.loctiteproducts.com/p/sg_plstc/overview/Loctite-Plastics-Bonding-System.htm

Again, I haven't tried it to know.

You could also have a crack at using some really rough sandpaper (like 40 grit) to dig up the surface to create some mechanical bonding.

AllSeeingSkink wrote:
If they're polyethylene bottles, regular epoxy won't work well either. There's actually very little that does a good job of bonding polyethylene or polypropylene. They have very low surface energy which means there's very little chemical bonding going on.

Hmmm... You are right, they probably are polypropylene so as not to react with chemicals in the medication. Good catch AllSeeingSkink.

That's going to make them a nightmare to paint, even if he did get them glued.

As a test - try wrapping one in masking tape maybe? The tape will stick to itself, then that surface should take primer/glue/paint?

Do you have the bottles already, or can we suggest a different base item?