Multipurpose Glue Showdown
Continuing the exploration of everyday carry, I’d like to put forth the idea of bringing glue with you in your exploits. Having liquid adhesive at hand — either a little tube of it in your bag for emergency fixes or a bottle in your broom closet for home repairs — is good practice that shouldn’t be ignored or put off. I’d like to give some suggestions on which glues may be worth trying out, as well as educate on the different kinds of glues that you should be aware of.
No, this blog will not start becoming like one of those mom blogs that become an advertising platform for diapers and baby food. More power to them, but those blog posts are just full of sponsored links. I do have Shopee affiliate links here to see if I can make affiliate marketing work, but the products I’m linking to are stuff that I actually tried out and like. In this case, I’ve been trying out a bunch of glues, while there are a couple here that have long been my go-to.
If you don’t have glue in your everyday carry, you should start carrying some now. If you have had glue leak all over your purse or backpack, that’s mostly on you. There should always be preparation through thoughtful choices for containers that will hold your adhesives and tools.
Top 5 Multipurpose Glues I’ve Used
These are the ones I’ve tried out over the past two years, and they’ve worked for me pretty well. As long as they stick things together and they never come apart, that’s all I really need. However, one of them became my new go-to due to both effectiveness, availability, and affordability.
Loctite Super Glue Gel Universal
This is my choice of cyanoacrylate glue for travel mostly because it doesn’t dry in the tube as quickly. If you’ve ever needed some super glue on the go, only to squeeze out next to nothing after eons of not using what you kept in case of emergency, then you’ll want it in a longer-lasting form. Stop buying super glue in a rush from 7-Eleven — that cost adds up.
The Loctite glue gel’s viscosity is both a strength and a weakness. It’s good as it gives you a greater deal of control, as well as volume that can add more structure to the repaired joint. Perhaps it may contract a bit, but you can then use the baking soda trick to hasten its drying and add even more volume. It takes some getting used to, but you’ll soon favor gel over liquid.
On the other hand, it’s bad because you can’t get it into small spaces and gaps as easily. While the latter can be somewhat annoying, especially if you’re doing repairs on small things, it’s better than inadvertently spilling CA glue all over and getting your fingers and other things stuck together unintentionally. Once that has happened to you, you’ll want it in gel form.
B-7000
This is my new favorite. I added a tube of it in every bag and loadout for my everyday carry. It’s like epoxy, but the hardener is air. Whatever the drawbacks of cyanoacrylate glue are, that’s what B-7000 is good at. It can flex, adhere to porous materials, and doesn’t dry in the tube as easily. Mind you, it can still turn into an unusable piece of silicone inside the tube over time.
The screw-on cap has a metal insert that goes into the metal applicator tip to keep glue from drying and blocking the opening. That’s something CA glues need, although they might stick to the insert and make the cap even harder to open instead. That’s what makes me start favoring this adhesive over CA glue, although the latter still dries much faster.
There’s also a T-7000, which is opaque black. It’s mainly used as adhesive for mobile devices. This is what repairers use to close your smartphone back up after heatgunning it open and fixing whatever needs to be fixed. If you like repairing your own stuff — which you should — then you need some T-7000 always handy.
Do note that if you’re going to order this from somewhere like Shopee or Lazada, get the ones that are from sellers that have been selling them at high volume because they’re less likely to already be hard in there. I bought some that were practically solid rubber inside, which was a waste of my money.
There are other variants like E-6000, which seems to be less of a different kind of glue and more about having a different container and applicator. I’ll have to try that one out sometime.
Amazing GOOP
It’s not Gwyneth Paltrow’s health nonsense, but ‘Amazing GOOP’ — all-purpose high-strength adhesive. It’s almost like a premium version of the B-7000, which means I’m not buying as many tubes of this as I would the B-7000.
Mind you, as of this writing, I’m still not sure how it’s better than the B-7000 other than the price tag and having read somewhere that it welds plastics together. Perhaps that was a false memory because I don’t see anywhere since that it actually does.
Application is more like contact cement, but you only need to wait two minutes for it to dry tacky before you put both surfaces together. Other than that, I can say perhaps the only advantage that the Amazing GOOP has over B-7000 is that it’s a bit more voluminous and doesn’t smell like it will make you high if you huff it too much.
UHU
I like the label design in this. There’s a Cold War vibe to its overall aesthetic. Made in Germany, UHU sounds like the opposite of UwU, but it’s actually pretty okay stuff. It works more like contact cement, so you’ll have to wait until it’s dried a bit until tacky.
As with contact cement, the main advantage of UHU compared to something like the Amazing GOOP is that the former doesn’t melt polystyrene while the latter does. In fact, both GOOP and B-7000 have solvents that can eat through polystyrene. UHU is solvent-free, making it worth keeping around in case you need to adhere anything that has polystyrene.
Liquid Nails
If you’re looking to stick something to your wall and you don’t want to drill holes or use screws and anchors like a good little child, don’t use super glue or some other adhesive at the very least. Perhaps you can use VHB tape, which I’ll recommend in a follow-up blog post about adhesive tape.
But for this one, I’ll recommend liquid nails because that’s a really cool name for a pretty cool adhesive. Or you can also buy a nail gun if you really must use nails, but don’t want to hurt your own thumb like Dave Portnoy.
Different Kinds of Glues
This is not every single one of them, but these are the ones you should be familiar with. You can repair things on the go and fix stuff around the house with these. The key is knowing what each of them is good for, then determining which ones you need the most in your life.
White Glue
Technically known as polyvinyl acetate or PVA glue, white glue is the liquid adhesive we all know from school. You can use it to stick together porous materials like wood, paper, cloth, pottery, and so on. That makes it useful beyond sticking pamphlets onto your notebook or popsicle sticks together. If you’re out of wood glue, this can be an ample substitute.
It takes 30 minutes to an hour for it to dry (with clamping), and it takes 18 to 24 hours to cure. However, even when cured, it’s not water resistant. While it’s not that useful as an everyday carry glue, it’s still good to have in your office or school supplies. Its availability and affordability makes it ubiquitous, and it doesn’t hurt that it’s nonflammable and dries clear.
Cyanoacrylate Glue
The one everyone knows as super glue or crazy glue, cyanoacrylate (CA) glue is versatile and quite ubiquitous in everyday life. It can stick together almost everything, and that ‘almost’ part is one of its two main drawbacks. It can’t adhere to any porous material, whether it’s natural or artificial. Fabrics, foams, or so on are its weakness.
You’ll go through bottles of CA glue trying to stick together two pieces of foam and find it futile.
The second drawback is its inability to flex. If it has to bend or hold tension, it will break off. Therefore, you can’t use it for anything that has to move or support. Perhaps you can use it if it inserts into another part, but you’re walking on thin ice with that.
On the other hand, what makes CA glue quite useful is its ability to be enhanced with kickers. You can buy a bottle of accelerant spray and make it dry even faster. While most people would say CA glue dries fast, many applications would make you think otherwise. But if you spray some kicker to it, you won’t have to keep it steady for what seems like forever.
Another kind of kicker you can use is baking soda. Search TikTok for ‘baking soda and super glue’ to be inundated with hundreds of short videos showing how baking soda can add volume and structure to CA glue. The aforementioned drawback of lack of flexibility and ample tensile strength can be curtailed with baking soda, although it still won’t make it as strong as steel.
But you can get pretty damn close to rock hardness. One of the most insane applications is using it for extracting stripped screws, which I just saw while writing this very sentence.
While other multipurpose adhesives may have more advantages, you can’t go wrong with having a bit of CA glue in your EDC to make small emergency repairs. It’s still pretty good stuff.
Epoxy
Composed of two parts — resin and hardener — epoxies are known to be very strong, durable, and water resistant. If you used epoxy to stick together two things you later want to take apart, you’ll find it quite difficult to undo what you did, especially once it has long been cured.
Epoxies are recommended for metal, ceramics, plastics, and rubber. Do know that its one weakness is the very hardness that makes it useful — it’s not good for flexible surfaces and moving parts. They usually take around a couple of hours to dry, although there are now epoxies that can dry within as quickly as 5 minutes. Curing can still take up to 12 hours.
Different types of epoxies — pure epoxy, polyester resins, and epoxy acrylates — dry and cure in different ways. They vary in attributes like strength, shrinkage, sag, cure time, chemical resistance, and so on. Therefore, it’s important to choose the right kind for your particular application and materials.
Polyurethane Glue
Most people would know this as Gorilla Glue, that amber liquid that takes a while to dry, but can grip like a gorilla holding onto a child before getting shot. It can be used on wood, metal, glass, ceramics, most plastics, and fiberglass. For those who have used Gorilla Glue, they know this type of glue can be really strong.
It can also be used for flexible materials like leather, cloth, rubber, and vinyl. It’s transparent when dried, and you can paint or stain it, which is why it’s favored by makers. However, while it has a lot of advantages over cyanoacrylate glue, polyurethane glue costs a lot more and has a much shorter shelf life. Use it for projects over emergency repairs.
Contact Cement
An all-time favorite, albeit mostly for the wrong reasons. If it’s not being used to stick soles to shoes, they’re being put in clear plastic bags for consumption. For those who don’t take to insufflation as their primary way of using contact cement, they know that you’re supposed to coat it on both surfaces, wait until it dries but still tacky, then press them together to bond instantaneously.
Take note that you can’t readjust it once you’ve stuck the two surfaces together. They’re not coming apart unless you destructively make them come apart. Only wear and tear over time will make those two surfaces come apart. That’s also why you want to buy shoes that are not only stuck together, but also sewn together.
Silicone Glue
Think of this as the mini version of caulk. Funny Instagram reels about squeezing caulk notwithstanding, you can waterproof stuff with silicone glue just as easily without needing a big caulking gun. Silicone glue can form strong and durable waterproof bonds with good high and low temperature resistance, making it perfect for fixing up gutters, shower doors, sinks, and so on. It sticks to metal, glass, fiberglass, acrylic, rubber, wood, or ceramic.
Silicone glue dries and skins over in less than an hour, but you’ll want to make sure it cures for 24 hours before putting it to work. As it’s silicone, it dries flexible, although it’s best used as a sealant over an adhesive for things that move or get handled often. You can choose between clear, black, and various metallic colors to either make it blend or stand out.
Household Cement
Various preparations of adhesive are sold as ‘household cement’. Some come in a tube, while others come in a two-part clay that you can press and mix together. The latter is what plumber’s epoxy is, for instance. Household cement can be used for wood, ceramics, glass, paper, and some plastics, depending on the brand and type. It sets up within 15 minutes or so, then cures after 24 hours.
Hot-melt Adhesive
It’s hot glue that comes out of a glue gun. If you’re into arts and crafts, you have a glue gun and several sticks of this stuff that you bought ten years ago and haven’t gotten to use yet because you don’t get enough time or motivation to finish that thing you promised yourself you’ll finish one day. You just have to make sure that the glue gun can generate adequate heat to melt the stick you have for long enough to glue things properly.
Always Have Glue At the Ready
Take note that I didn’t include every single glue here. There are more like wood glue, fabric glue, pipe cement, spray adhesive, and so on. I focused mostly on glues that can be included in one’s everyday carry for travel and convenience.
Every glue has its purpose, and it’s up to you to learn what each of them is good for. There’s no one glue that can stick them all as each material better accommodates one glue over others. You also don’t want to bang your head on the proverbial wall — if one glue is not working for a certain material, don’t force it to work by using more. Do your research and look for a different kind of glue that will better work for your use case.
Also, do remember that not everything can be fixed with glue. While liquid adhesive is an easy solution for a lot of repair tasks, they’re not meant to be a fix for everything. A lot of times, glue is only a temporary solution that will take you far enough until you can implement a more permanent fix. Of course, as they would say, there’s no more permanent solution than a temporary solution that works. If you tend to follow that saying, stick with it at your own risk.
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