Alternatives to Loctite

Has anyone tried the adhesives supplied by Powerbond? They are a U.K. supplier, yet their products seem to be incredibly cheap. For instance, their RT3500B seems to be the equivalent of Loctite B480, yet it is £6.97 plus VAT for 50gm.

ARC Euro also sell some Loctite type products.

I have used quite a few of the Everbuild adhesives sold by Toolstation. They may be even cheaper than Powerbond in some cases.

For thread lockers I am currently using Visbella products, namely Visbella 6271 and Visbella 6642. They work very well indeed.

I have not tried Powerbond, but I can heartily endorse Arc Euros Bond Lock products.

I purchased some Loctite threadlock off Ebay. I didn't look closely enough at the photo and finished up with a Chinese fake instead. Nothing to lose, so I tried it out. It appears to be every bit as good as the genuine product, much to my amazement.

Andrew.

Not neccessarily a Chinese fake. It may well be genuine Chinese market Loctite. I have some and it's the real stuff.

Just like the genuine China market Bijur one shot lubrication systems that Arc were selling for a while.

Another old method is to coat the part with solder paste and heat up after assembly.

I buy my thread lock , chinese variety from RapidRC . They come in larger bottles and in four strenghts Low . Medium and High.and ultra High . They are quick setting and in My experience have been very good . They are not Fake as already discussed but genuine Chinese equivalent of locktite etc . Cost is £3-99 a bottle. Raid Rc do a good postal service , usually in the post the same day provided its in stock.

Edited By Philip Fearn on 19/02/2022 12:21:52

Surely this hinges on the reliability of the product? Can’t imagine NASA using a cheaply specified adhesives, sealants etc..

Cheap may be good enough for most, but not for the most highly stressed items which simply must have a very low failure rate over an extended period - sometimes approaching zero and years of continuous operation - such as space-bound items, or perhaps F1 power-plants, for instance.

Sadly, with many things there's a very imperfect correlation between price and reliability, particularly nowadays.

In the case of most established thread lockers at least, from the cheap brands to the expensive ones, reliability may more often be determined by the way the end user applies the stuff than by the chemical composition of the product.

I suspect at Nasa they apply the stuff in accordance with the instructions.

Hard to tell what makes one product better than another these days. Cyanoacrylate was first marketed as a super glue seventy years ago. The chemical is well outside the patent protection period and even if what it was and how it was made were kept private there are no Trade Secrets that can't be penetrated by scientific method.

Cyanoacrylate isn't difficult to synthesise and globalisation means that the owner of a clever western process might choose to have it applied abroad where costs are lower. And many countries classified as "Developing" in my youth are now more-or-less fully "Developed", and inventive in their own right.

Super-glue might be costly because chaps believe in brand-names and like things to be reassuring expensive, not realising pound-shop glue might be identical. Or it might be costly because it's been made to extra-high purity with property improving additives, tested, has been carefully stored and transported, and is traceable. Cheap glue might be proper glue nearing best before date, or it might be fake. The retail buying public rarely gets to know exactly what we're receiving. Industry are more informed and careful and absorb the extra cost of certification by bulk buying.

All the super-glue I use goes off quickly once the container is opened. Doesn't matter if the glue was cheap or expensive. All glues dislike dirt equally too. That said, although I use cheapest possible super-glue when longevity doesn't matter, I buy new reputable brand glue when it does. Just in case...

Where stuff was made, brand-names, hearsay reputation and cost do not guarantee 'quality'. Life is more complicated than that.

Dave

Well I use Everbuild cyano. Mine will last for years when opened, because I keep it in a refrigerator. I suggest that SOD does the same and tell us if his cyano then lasts.

I usually only have one bottle open at a time and put a date on it when opened. A few months ago I came upon a "lost " bottle in the fridge with January 2018 on it. Still worked like a charm.

A friend of mine is an industrial chemist who once ran a cyano manufacturing plant in the UK. He confirmed my findings "put the top back on the bottle and stick it in the fridge" was his comment., It doesn't last for ever, but you can easily tell when it goes off, because it will take a good bit longer than normal to grab.

His final comment was that people don't read the instructions and that is the usual failure mode.

Andrew.

ck it in the fri

Edited By Andrew Tinsley on 19/02/2022 15:26:38

Depends what you're doing with it:

When we did the modification for the front wheel on a Cessna Caravan, spending £20 on a bottle of the specified Loctite to use just a few drops, was nothing as part of an £8000 job on a million pound aeroplane.

If you're locking a thread on a toy train that might run for a dozen hours a year, using some of the unbranded stuff that you bought 8 years ago from the local fastener shop is going to be more than good enough.

Edited By Nicholas Wheeler 1 on 19/02/2022 15:46:08

When at Boeing we used to use Loctite 2222 (I think) which when I looked it up (to compare to 222) is 222 but with better certification... I think they were able to trace every part of the manufacturing process, with the associated increase in price. But as mentioned, sometimes the price is justified.

At work we have to use an exact spec of Loctite (I forget the grade). The bottles have to be logged and the exp date recorded. This is just to hold a press fit bearing in place.

At home I'm happy to buy out of date Loctite and use it until its gone!

Horses for courses.

Jim

Don't know what it's like now but back in the day (1970's) NASA wouldn't allow the use of Loctite etc at all. (Out-gassing problems in vacuum and consequent loss of locking if memory serves). All screws had to be wire-locked. That was OK in most cases but it left the "single screw" problem. In that case you could often add an extra, do-nothing, screw (tut-tuts about weight) or even a feature to lock-wire it to.

In extreme cases you could resort to using epoxy on the thread of the screw in lieu of wire-locking - installed at the last point in the assembly/test sequence when "it doesn't have to come apart again". Yeah, right!

Adhesives and sealants etc had to be selected from NASA's approved list and I remember, when mixing up a 2-part epoxy, the mix had to be placed in a bell-jar and the air evacuated for a period to remove any contained air/gases from the mix before it was used.

Edited By Peter Greene 🇨🇦 on 19/02/2022 19:45:30

Thanks for all these wise words. As I only want it to assemble a white metal model (which will be left outside in the summer) it makes sense to go with a cheaper substitute. Hardly mission-critical, and definitely no need for batch traceability!