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I am building some empire knights, and I was wondering if I could glue them onto the horse after I painted the saddle.

Yes, you can. Superglue will work as usual but if you use plastic glue the bond won't be as strong as plastic-to-plastic (though it'll still hold).

It is generally best to scrape/sand away some paint at the join to get optimum results. Hope this helped.

You can, but the bond is much weaker if you don't scrape paint off to get to bare plastic(which I do all the time). I just use an xacto knife to scrape off the paint where I'm gluing, or at least a decent bit in the middle of the spot I'm gluing, and I then still am gluing plastic to plastic.

 TheManWithNoPlan wrote:
...but if you use plastic glue the bond won't be as strong as plastic-to-plastic (though it'll still hold).

The bond would be practically non-existent, and would work loose rather easily.

Better to scrape back to plastic, as plastic cement works specifically by fusing the plastic surfaces together. It needs bare plastic on both sides to work.


Superglue will work, but the bond will only be as strong as the paint, which tends to be weaker than the glue. So again you can wind up with the part coming off if it gets knocked or pulled, and in this case can take a chunk of paint with it from around the glued joint. So, again, better to scrape away a little paint and glue surface to surface.

Depends. Acrylic is really just another form of plastic, it will be as strong as the bond between the paint and the model.

I used to glue over the old Citadel base coat paints to get stronger adhesion than I would on plastic or metal. I started doing this with metal Terminators to get their arms to stop falling off during games (I was willing to try anything.) It solved the problem.

Not sure how things would work with the current batch of paints, given they are a little thinner then the old basing paints used to be. I basecoat my 40k miniatures with spray paint these days and it works just fine for gluing.

 techsoldaten wrote:
Depends. Acrylic is really just another form of plastic, it will be as strong as the bond between the paint and the model.

That's sort of like saying that a window should be as strong as a rock...

Gluing to a thin sheath of 'plastic' layered over another surface is not going to get you a stronger bond than gluing to the actual surface.

I glued painted pieces together with superglue in the past. In holds, but is pretty fragile. When a part glued like that breaks off, it's not the glue bond that breaks, but the paint that peels away from the plastic. This type of glue-up really is only as strong as the bond between paint and plastic.

Also, instead of painting then scraping with a blade, you can also mask the area before painting (with blue tack or a masking medium).

Styrene glue is designed to basically melt the styrene of the plastic and then bond them together. If you want a permanent bond, scrape a small spot of paint to bare plastic on plastic and use styrene glue. Styrene glue will NOT dissolve or properly bond with acrylic paint.

However, I have used super glue gel in this case without scraping to bare plastic and the model sticks as good as the paint will stick to the plastic. You can probably snap it off, if you needed. If I have metal in the mix, then super glue gel is the best option for me.