Recently appearing on the shelves of hardware stores, hot melt quickly gained popularity among needlewomen and home craftsmen. Due to the speed of gluing and the breadth of application, glue and heat gun are unmatched in convenience and affordability. Of course, the strength of the joints in this way is not the highest and the scope is limited by temperature limits. But with the daily tasks of making various crafts with your own hands, hot melt adhesive copes with ease and speed that satisfies most requests.
Safety
First of all, it is worth mentioning the safety measures when working with hot glue. With their own hands, many housewives felt the danger of high temperatures in the kitchen and at home, so you need to remember about safety.
Glue, sticking to the skin, releases a significant part of the heatnot only during cooling, but also during solidification. Therefore, it can cause burns much deeper than a hot frying pan or tile, from which you can pull your hand away in time, receiving minimal damage. Additionally, you should carefully read the instructions for the device and follow the recommendations specified by the manufacturer.
Wax instead of glue
It's time to try the device in action. Of course, they can be glued, but it is much more interesting to find an original use for it. The principle of operation of the gun is to heat the material and melt it to a liquid state. This means that any material with a suitable melting point can be used in the gun. Thus, wax crayons, when heated in this way, become not just a gel-like mass, like glue tubes, but a liquid, like drinking yogurt.
Using different colors and fantasy, you can get colorful drops on cardboard or thick paper, and if you drip from a height of half a meter, you get blots. The gun, of course, can get dirty, and in order to clean it after artistic activities, you should skip a certain amount of factory glue, which will wash off the wax from the inside. Recall that wax is a rather oily material, and not all surfaces in a row will be able to hold it for a long time. The porous structure of wood or cardboard can provide enough grip.
Vintage Wax Seals
In the same way, you can heat the wax for making seals and impressions, for example, to seal a letter of congratulationsor private message. Using coins or other embossed metal objects, you can even achieve a resemblance to obsolete wax seals.
A letter with such a seal will not only please the addressee with its originality, but will also bring some intimacy and mystery into the correspondence. Oh yes, wax is quite fragile, unlike sealing wax, so do not trust these letters by mail, present them personally.
Glue decoration
Do-it-yourself transparent or colored hot-melt adhesive can be turned not only into a fixing compound, but also into an element of decoration. Simple and unprepossessing glass vases, finished with a hot melt pattern on the outside, will sparkle with new colors and impress your guests as an original work of your own hands.
In the same way, you can draw three-dimensional figures and whole pictures on any household containers, boxes and just on cardboard under a frame on the wall. Not any paint is suitable for coloring colorless glue - watercolor or gouache will quickly be erased from the surface. It is best to use acrylic-based paints or, in a pinch, nail polish.
DIY hot glue crafts are a great pastime with children, training accuracy, responsibility and artistic flair in them. The main thing - do not leave children alone with the device turned on or just warmed up.
Glue color classification
Let's deal with these colored sticks. It can't be that manufacturers just randomly added dyes. Indeed, there is a recommended international marking and here are the main types of rods for a thermal gun:
- Simple translucent cylindrical sticks are the most popular type of glue. Versatile, applicable to a wide variety of surfaces and materials, suitable for almost any hidden and open fasteners.
- Colored opaque rods differ from the universal ones only in color. It makes sense to buy them for those who are engaged in crafts, children and florists. They allow you to mask the bonding area under the overall color of the product without the use of additional coloring.
-
Black and gray stickers are designed for waterproofing areas, and are also used as electrical insulation. The non-shrinking and adhesive properties of the material are used in sealing window frames and insulating current-carrying parts of electrical appliances.
- White opaque rods are used specifically for gluing metal and glass, except, of course, for universal adhesives painted white, pay attention to the packaging.
- Yellow or candle wood-colored translucent sticks have better adhesion to the porous structure of wood or cardboard.
In any case, not all manufacturers have yet come to common standards and it is necessary to check the technical properties of the adhesive, referring to the packaging. You can also find out the melting point of the material and the approximate temperature range of its use.
In electrical appliances,often, materials that can withstand prolonged heat are required, in other cases, a non-rigid plastic fixation, such as silicone, may be required, for example, in the manufacture of hand tools. You also need to take into account the capabilities of your device for working with glue, so that the thermal gun has enough power to melt the material during operation.
Do-it-yourself gun
The market is now flooded with not the best quality tools, and heat guns are no exception. They usually break at the most inopportune moment, and you may need a reliable device to use the remaining hot melt adhesive.
You can quickly build a heater to work from an old iron or use a soldering iron, but here you may encounter the problem of overheating of the material. For a permanent job, craftsmen would rather be inspired by the idea of making a hot glue gun with their own hands.
The current power regulator will help control the temperature
First of all, we need to make a current power regulator, no matter what heating device we use. Overheating of the adhesive material will inevitably lead to its strong liquefaction (as a result, spontaneous leakage from the gun) or even burnout.
A regulator is made by sequentially connecting a dimmer to a circuit break, like a switch, where it will perform the above functions and adjust the power of the supplied current. It will be convenient to make a separate outlet with a regulator on a piece of wooden board, it is likely that current power control will also be needed forother appliances.
Boiler based glue gun
Now we can be sure that the boiler will not burn without water, but will only heat up to the desired temperature. The next step is to make a comfortable handle so that you don’t burn yourself on a heated device. The most affordable material for a handle is wood, but it is also afraid of high temperatures and you can use Teflon tape used in cooking to protect it.
As a working container for melting glue, you need to make a tube and a funnel out of a can, connecting them together so that the edges of the funnel cover the tube. The diameter of the working crucible should be such that the funnel is tightly clamped by the coils of the boiler. We additionally strengthen the structure with copper wire and test the device on a suitable piece of glue stick. The lack of a feed lever, this design compensates for the incredible "omnivorous", that is, the tool is suitable for any type of hot melt adhesive, regardless of its melting temperature.
If you run out of glue
Consider the situation in reverse, there is a useless thermal gun without suitable stickers, and you need to stick something "here and now." We postpone the orphaned tool until the purchase of suitable consumables for it and turn our attention to another, no less versatile heating device in use - a hair dryer.
Of course, hair models will be inappropriate here, meaning a professional building hair dryer that produces a high air temperature. Here they canheat the glue right at the junction. By the way, the glue itself is literally lying around underfoot.
We offer 2 most common options for how to make hot melt glue with your own hands:
- Foamed polypropylene or polyethylene can occasionally be found as a packaging material, but most often it is found in construction and finishing works as heat and sound insulation. The connection is not so much strong as plastic, not afraid of shock and vibration.
- The well-known plastic bottles that fill the landfills of the whole Earth are also suitable as an adhesive material. Heat the whole bottle with a hair dryer for quite a long time, so it is better to cut the plate of the desired size at the gluing site.
Both options are unstable at high temperatures, but will work for most jobs where regular hot melt adhesive is sufficient. Thus, you dispose of the garbage and get a practically inexhaustible supply of glue.
Name confusion: electrical circuit adhesive
For people involved in circuitry, the words "thermal adhesive" have the same meaning as "hot-melt adhesive for heatsinks". It is very difficult to make such material with your own hands, since chemical reactions are used here, and not a change in the state of aggregation of a substance under the influence of temperature.
It is impossible to compare hot melt adhesive for a gun and hot melt adhesive for LEDs, which are different in composition and purpose. With your own hands it is possible to make the so-called glycerin cement fromlead litharge and glycerin as a heat-conducting layer and adhesive at the same time.
There are also proven industrial options for heat-resistant materials for gluing, which, of course, are better to have available than to prepare hot-melt adhesive with your own hands. "Alsil-5" and "Radial" are the most famous brands among specialists. In addition, several types of heat-conducting rubber are produced. And how exactly heat-resistant glue is used, you should read in the instructions.
