Best glue for sheeting foam wings

[stuey]

Hi, I will soon be sheeting some small foam wing cores for my F-18 and need some advice on the best glue to use. I will be using 1/32 balsa sheet as the wing panels are pretty small. Any advice would be much appreciated.

[Tim Mackey]

I always used copydex, but havent done this for a while so there may well be more modern suitable stuff around these days, Im sure you will get loads of answers soon. Even thin epoxy such as laminating epoxy would do, or maybe spray on like 3M 44 or whatever its called. UHU Por do a spray contact adhesive, as do the cheapo supermarkets like Lidl from time to time - I think I saw such an offer very recently in fact.

( everyone else is flying I think - I have just finished a tour of duty in the garden all day )

Edited By Timbo - Moderator on 11/04/2009 18:38:09

[ken anderson.]

timbo-couldn't get moved at our patch-never mind nxt week when they are all back at the slave camp's it'll be back to normal.................

 

 

             ken anderson..............

[Matt Jones]

I do a lot of this and like Timbo always use Copydex. There's a self adhesive film called something Gudy 800 but never used it.

[stuey]

Thanks for the replys chaps, any particular version of copydex?

[Ed Kershaw]

For what it's worth, I do this sometimes too and prefer to use a really thin coat of laminating epoxy (I get it from a boat chandellery).  I find the difficulty with copydex is that a) it curls the skin backwards and makes it difficult to position, then b) to make matters worse, you only get one go at it as you cannot reposition with copydex.  Plus, when you come to sand the edges you get little balls of rubber where you want to glue the LE and TE on.  Maybe I just don't have the correct knack.

 

One of the nice things about the epoxy method, other than the ability to reposition, is that you can also laminate a thin layer of glass into the skin/core joint to make a really strong wing - useful for high aspect ratio long thin wings.  I've got an old German F5B model that used this method.  The wings take massive G loads and seem virtually  indistructable.

 

In his excellent book "Radio Control Foam Modelling", David Thomas demonstrates several methods, but he seems to prefer using the Gudy O film, as Matt suggests.

[Matt Jones]

There's only one Copydex as far as I know.

[Ralph Yeates]

Copydex