I’m being a curmudgeon tonight. I’d heard all sorts of great things about E-6000 glue. I’d heard that a bail glued on with this stuff is very difficult to get off.
So far I’m underwhelmed.
When I first tried gluing a bail on to a cabochon with it I waited almost 36 hours before trying it out. I tugged on it a little bit and it seemed to hold pretty firmly. Then I tried a dirty rotten trick; I tried twisting the bail off and it tore off fairly easily. I had even roughed up both the cabochon and the bail and it still tore off without much effort. OK, Granted what I was trying to do was functionally equivalent to buying a 20 dollar pocket calculator then dropping from 6 feet just to see what happens…but still I expected more given the claims I had heard. Disappointed, I dug in and did more research and found that the glue I was using wasn’t “fresh” enough. Numerous sites said that when you squeeze a dollop out you need to get the glue from the freshest part of the dollop. In other words you can’t use the part of the glue that’s skinned over or has started to congeal. If you do the bond will be DOA. The one thing I noticed while working with E-6000 is that it skins over almost immediately and when you starting poking around in it with a tooth pick to get the glue you introduce more air into the mix and end up with a third to a half of the dollop wasted because it’s congealed. One gal on some forum had a technique where she held the tube of glue in one hand, got the cap off with one hand, quickly got some glue with a tooth pick, put the cap back on and then glued the bail on to the cabochon. I don’t do her description justice but it sounded like she had the skill of a surgeon and the speed of Apollo Ohno.
Well I don’t.
I’m going to give two part Epoxy a shot. I like the idea of being able to mix a small amount and have it be usable for half an hour or so. I’m more likely to do neater work than having to rush to get the “freshest” part of the glue just for one or two cabochons and having to throw the rest of it away. I’ll keep you posted on how things go. I’ll be doing another “twist” test.
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