Loctite shelf life

in the past in production ABS..poly propolene .PVDF.all glued with some thing abs to ali proved tricky until a larger glue line provided.

Teflon...now theres a chalenge.. tends to be "coated" onto substrate in molten form or vapour deposited..

In NZ there is a group of people who collect time expired medicines, and used medical equipment for use in 3rd world countries. I remember when I was nursing, one job I had was a monthly stock take of drugs, and sterilized gear for use by dates, In those days we sterilized our own dressing packs, made up from the left overs of comercial pack, but thats a NO NO now days. Ian S C

My Austin A30 van had the same window problem. Where I worked we had some wonderful two part adhesive now known as Araldite, which had very good insulation properties and which we used when repairing traction motors. I thought I'd give it a try on the window catches, they never came off again. We also had another two part material, which the fitters used to mix up and squirt into very hot cracked exhaust manifolds as a temporary repair, brilliant stuff. I wonder what the research chemists are developing today, ready for use in the future. Ted

Hi Peter, the Loctite retainers are designed to be used on cylindrical items. One common use that we had for these, where I used to work a few years back, was where a ball bearing had spun on it's journal and thus making a new bearing a slide on fit instead of a press on fit. Providing there was no shake to talk about we used Loctite 638 to glue a new bearing on which often saved buying or making a new shaft, of which some of them were very expensive. You had to heat the bearing up and tap it off fairly quickly when it needed another new bearing though.

Another job was a helical pinion on a motor shaft, after many times these pinions were pulled off the motor shaft and fouling the locking nut on the shaft with the gear that this one was driving, the gearbox manufacture came up with this remady and it worked fine.

I used To use Industrial two pack Araldite way back in the 70's for sticking 5 ft stainless steel screen cloth to a circular box section ring which was then clamp into the machine. I remeber having to wiegh out the two epoxies quite precisely, other wise it would not go off. The screen cloth had to be bolted into a frame to make it taut, the Araldite was then mixed and applied to the ring and then the frame with the cloth was lowered on to it. The Araldite would then ooze through the cloth and puddle flat, it then had to be covered with a tarpulin and left for at least 24 hours before trimming the cloth to suit the outside of the ring.

Regards Nick.

Edited By Nicholas Farr on 09/05/2013 18:21:18

I have a bottle of red from 1978 and it's still good. 'Sbeen out at 45 below Centigrade and 39 above, which doesn't seem to have worried it.

Ian

Seriously, if you were to test the well out of date loctite against specification they would fail. We used to...and they did.

I use bearing retainer to seal sight glasses, brillians stuff!

.

That's interesting ... but it does beg some questions:

1. what constitues "well out of date" ?
2. which aspect of the specification ?
3. how did you test ?
4. by how much did they fail ?
5. which grades did you test ?
6. is it equally true for all grades tested ?

I am very keen to understand.

Thanks

MichaelG.

For those interested:

I've just found Henkel's single page Shelf Life Policy

I'm disappointed to find it more "Policy" than "Information".

MichaelG.

.

Edit:  There is another version here.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 11/05/2013 08:30:10

Edited By Chris Trice on 11/05/2013 09:34:43

Chris,

Fair comment, but

This thread started with a question about "Loctite" and was [I think] specific to the Anaerobic "threadlockers" and "retainers" that we commonly refer to as Loctite.

Henkel now gives us a single Policy Statement to cover all Loctite Branded products [many and varied] .... and I sense a "lowest common denominator" approach to their Shelf Life Policy.

I am hoping that Fizzy can enlighten us, with some actual test data for the Anaerobics.

MichaelG.

Edited By Michael Gilligan on 11/05/2013 10:04:27

Apologies for the sweeping statement without factual data - but it was many years ago. I was QA and Technical manager for Linde Fork lift trucks, built to the same standards as automotive, and we used various grades of loctite on lots of components (more sweeping generalisations...sorry). If a bottle was out of date by just a day it was destroyed, which was a damned expensive thing to do. I dont have the data, but we tested out of date product and found the results unacceptible - nuts and studs not holding etc. Cant be more unhelpful than that, sorry.

Hi folks, I'm still using the remains of a very large bottle of Loctite 601 given to me in the early 70's, now with all these comments on shelf life of the material, what then of the expected life of the product when in use? Can I expect to see 40 years of locomotive building suddenly fail? Seriously, whenever I use the Loctite 601 the old adage of cleanlness is next to godliness works every time and to date I have never had a failure; it is imperative the recommended tolerances are maintained whilst machining the mating components and all oils etc are totally removed, better still, avoided whilst machining the component parts particularly in the case of cast iron.

Regards,

Bob Y