Ask A Genius 892: Epoxy and Glue
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/02/05
[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: What do you think about epoxy and glue?
Rick Rosner: I’ve become a glue fan over the past few years. We probably have five or six different kinds of glues for other purposes in the house. Epoxy is lovely. I used it 15 or 20 years ago; I had a coloured epoxy kit that was great for making jewelry. Epoxy is a two-part resin that, when you mix it, turns into a tough substance within a few minutes.
Jacobsen: Would you consider it harder than super glue?
Rosner: Well, super glue is a different kind of adhesive. Superglue is a very effective thin-layer adhesive for semi-porous materials like porcelain. There’s a whole theory of adhesion: you got these Van der Waals forces that bind atoms and molecules together, and when something breaks, these bonds are severed, and surfaces are exposed to air, so they get coated with air molecules, which are bad at bonding. So, it would help if you had an adhesive that forces the air molecules out or absorbs them. If you broke something on the moon, you could put it back together, and it might stick together fairly well because there was no air to fuck up the bonds across the broken part; it wouldn’t stick together as well as before you broke it. Super glue is good for where you’ve got a really precise break; if you get the two pieces back together, they will fit together with not even a 20th of a millimetre gap along most of the surface. Super glue’s good for broken pottery or non-sheer forces. Like in the super glue commercial, they glue two highly polished steel plates together, and one of the plates is attached to a guy’s hard hat, and the guy dangles from the hard hat. So, there’s not much of a gap between the two steel surfaces and not much sheer force because all the force is perpendicular to the bond plane. So, superglue is good for that.
Epoxy is a space-filling adhesive, and it’s very hard. If you need to embed something in something else, epoxy might be your thing; I used it for jewelry where I would use it like a cold cloisonne where I’d make a honeycomb structure. I’d cast a honeycomb structure out of some metal so it had a grid with all sorts of holes like chicken wire, and I would fill each of the holes with epoxy, and it would create a cloisonne effect when it hardened, that each of the holes would be filled and it was a pretty durable product. I remember the first time I used epoxy, the first time I went back to high school, creating a fake transcript.
This was just me under my name in 1978, and I had a copy of my official transcript, and I made a copy of the school seal by gluing a Dixie cup around the seal minus the bottom of the cup, pouring an epoxy and letting it harden, turning it over, doing it again, and pulling it apart, scraping the paper out of the sides of the epoxy which created a mould that I could use with vice grips to create a fake school seal. I was very proud of my spy craft, and epoxy was hard enough to do that, to withstand being crushed by a vice grip and create an impression on paper. So, yeah, I love epoxy, but it could be better for some things. Gorilla Glue is nice. I’ve probably glued my tennis shoes back together six times. Nothing else I’ve ever tried, including Shoegoo, has kept my tennis shoes together for any time. I like E6000 for putting micro mosaics back together. I wouldn’t say I like the historically accurate glue that holds micro mosaics together, which is this paste made out of oil and flour; it gives up after a century so that pieces can fall out. Also, it absorbs moisture, so it will swell up and destroy antique micro mosaics drilled out of solid pieces of onyx.
You take a piece of onyx that’s 5 mm thick and drill out a basin that’s maybe three mm thick. Then, you put in a layer of your paste. Then you stick in all your Mosaic pieces, but over a century or probably over just a few decades, that paste can absorb moisture and pop the onyx apart, which works in my favour because some pieces are intact, and those are expensive. And some pieces just got popped by the expansion of the paste. Recently, I bought a cheap early micro mosaic brooch by a guy who is an early master of micro mosaics whose stuff is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This priceless stuff was not priceless; it was way less than priceless because it had popped apart and fractured. But I think I can get in there, and somebody also had done a shitty job using the wrong adhesive; you see that a lot in repairing micro mosaics. Some people use whatever goop is available and goop it all up, and somebody had gooped this all up. Still, I think I can get in there with dental tools, remove the goop, and use an appropriate adhesive to remove maybe even a bit of the swollen old paste and get the pieces back together with much smaller gaps than the current busted-up version.
Another thing about glue: I used to get high off of glue. I used to build a lot of car and plane models when I was a little kid in the late 60s into the 70s, and back then, plastic glue and model glue had fumes that would fuck you up. I didn’t mean to get high, but when you’re working for 2 hours on a plastic model, and you’re holding these tiny pieces up in front of your face, by the time I went to dinner, I was pretty dizzy. Some people would sniff glue on purpose; you squeeze a bunch of it, I think, into a plastic bag, and then you huff the bag. For the past 40 years or so, the glue has been fixed, so it doesn’t get you high anymore, but that was my first experience with intoxicants.
[Recording End]
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