Original adhesive containers only please!

Rebecca Wilmot
Adhesive Selection and Use, Troubleshooting
September 8, 2017

I recently sat in on a meeting regarding redesigning a cap for one of our adhesive products.  I had expected the meeting to be a real snooze.  The real science is the adhesive in the bottle, not the bottle itself – right?  I was surprised at all of the material science and engineering that goes into a new design.  Adhesive packaging for optimum shelf life, safety, ease of use, and waste reduction is a science in itself.  This is why Permabond encourages people to use adhesive directly from the original adhesive containers only.  The two primary reasons are:

  1. Safety

In some instances, spills simply result in a mess and wasted adhesive.  In other cases – such as a large cyanoacrylate spill, there can be health and safety issues if those present don’t know the proper way to clean it up.

Unlabeled or incorrectly labeled adhesive containers can be a health and safety issue. A minor example of this was my lazy sister taking an orange juice carton out of my mother’s fridge and taking a swig directly from it.  Mother had re-used the carton, and inside was some revolting soup concoction instead. Needless to say, it prevented my sister’s slovenly behavior in the future (well, in that aspect anyway!). Disposable food containers are the most dangerous. Please don’t transfer adhesives into things like paper drinking cups. We’ve heard horror stories of people accidentally drinking cyanoacrylate from a paper cup (it looks a lot like water).

  1. Product Performance

Repackaging Permabond adhesive from the original adhesive containers will void the warranty. We don’t do this to be difficult – we do it because we can’t control the consistency of the adhesive or the bonds it forms in other packaging.

Following are a few examples of repackaging gone wrong:

A medical device manufacturer had a line of operators manually applying adhesive via a pin transfer method.  The bond area was very small, and only a minute amount of adhesive was needed.  To ease the process, they transferred the cyanoacrylate into very small glass vials, which were supported so they didn’t tip and the pin for transferring could stand in the vial.  It seemed like a good process improvement – however – cyanoacrylate is not compatible with glass.  Soon, the adhesive started to gel and cure. Worse than the waste of adhesive, some of the devices made while the adhesive was gelling had too much adhesive on them. These expensive assemblies were now scrap.

A pipe fitter wanted to apply pipe sealant more quickly.  The brush in the original container was narrower than the pipe threads he wanted to cover.  The wider brush didn’t fit into the container. So to speed the process, he put the pipe sealant into a metal can and applied with a larger brush.  The following day he noted that the sealant was hard around the edges of the can.  He immediately realized that metal was the catalyst to make the anaerobic sealant cure.

A glass artisan was using a UV curable adhesive in glass lamp designs.  To better control the adhesive placement, the artist put the adhesive into a small paint pot to apply with a brush.  Although the adhesive cures with UV light – not visible light – enough UV light found its way to the paint pot to skin the adhesive over in minutes.

Permabond has a large variety of packaging and a team of technical support staff to help you choose the best adhesive pack size for your application.  Please contact Permabond.

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