Ye Olde Rocket Forum - View Single Post - Model Master Plastic Cement

When I have built Apollo LES towers for Little Joe-II models of various scale, I had to use a jig and assemble the individually cut parts together. All the parts were styrene plastic tube or rod. Tube glue would not work, due to leaving bulges and mottled areas. Liquid cement like Plastruct Plastic Weld worked well for basic assembly. BUT, the parts had gaps at the joints.

So, I used a nearly empty bottle of Plastic Weld and put chopped up bits of white styrene into it, so the Plastic Weld would slowly dissolve the styrene bits. It took days, and I shook/stirred it often to speed up the process. Eventually I ended up with a very thin slightly syrupy version of Plastic Weld with dissolved styrene that I could use to fill those gaps.

I used a flat headed dress pin (not needle), holding it by the pointy end, to dip into the Plastic Weld (poured some into the inverted cap), to get one drop of it onto the flat head, place that drop into the area that needed filling, and the drop flowed into place by capillary action. I only did one drop at each joint, let dry, then one more drop, etc, until finally the gaps were filled and the result looked like the part had originally fit perfectly and had been welded like the real thing.

Note that I did not use a brush, as brushing would have gotten the glue a bit past the joint areas and mottled the appearance. At that tiny size, no way to properly “sand” such areas smooth, only fix was never get any glue outside of the joint.