household fix

Aug

2018

Household Fixes

All The Things That You Can Fix in Your Household

If you have children then you will need glue. Not everything can be repaired but around the home, with children, the things that can need fixing can be endless. Even without some way to repair all the things that just wear out or break, with children, it can sometimes be a little mind numbing.

Sometimes, when a favourite toy breaks(or gets broken) there is no consolation in a new one. And this may not be a habit that you want to install in your child, ‘It broke, Daddy, buy me a new one, right now!” And some things in life just can’t be fixed, we all have to learn that one as well.

The last thing you want to do is constantly tell your children ‘don’t touch’ or ‘stop’. And it is pretty much impossible to make your home 100% ‘child proof’.

The Helpful Child!

Your 4-5 year old daughter wants to help by filling your favourite coffee mug(that you have had for 20 years) with something to drink but it comes to you minus the handle. Getting angry at your child or getting in a funk won’t put the handle back on but Mister Glue will.

Why Don’t I Hear the Children Playing??

You are visiting your sister and things are very quiet for far too long so you go looking for your toddler. You find her in the bedroom with jewelry all over her and the floor. No idea how a five year old could have gotten into the locked cabinet! Hire her out to a security firm. The tangled jewelry can be untangled. The earring backs and stones that have been removed can be mended with Mister Glue.

Encouraging the Young Artist

The weekend spent with your 12 year old nephew teaching him wood carving. I’ve never met a kid that age that would listen when told to work on something simple first then go to more complicated. Come to think of it, that goes for most boys just about any age. Including me!

So, your nephew decides that he loves horses so he should carve out the legs and tail as on his favourite Arabian from the movie The Black Stallion. (Every 12 year old should watch this movie!)

You patiently work with him over several days or a couple of weekends. And he is getting there, doing quite well. But he is not satisfied with one of the legs and carves it too close. Now you are stuck with a three legged horse! Or are you? Take some sawdust the same colour as the wood carving and sprinkle it on in such a way to hold the two pieces together add a drop or two of Mister Glue and you can re-attach the broken leg. You may have to do a couple of layers and/or turn it over and work the other side but with some gentle sanding afterwards, all should be good again. You could even use this technique to add a tiny extra length to the short leg to give balance. Disaster averted!

Gardening Tools in the Pool

The little ones are playing in the backyard play pool. You are keeping an eye and even though you have supplied soft toys so no holes get poked in the blown up air section or the bottom. Somehow one of the kids illegally imports a sharp gardening tool. Voila, you have a bunch of panicky kids as the air and water pour out of the pool. Don’t fret. Get your bottle of Mister Glue and any two pieces of vinyl patching material. Dry off the surfaces and patch both sides of the hole(or holes). Hold tightly for about 20 seconds for the bond to be sure and then give it a few minutes before refilling. I’m sure if someone uses the hose as a spray this will keep the kids quite well occupied for the few minutes it will take to find the glue and do the repair.

Don’t Sit on That Chair!

A loose spindle or leg on a kitchen chair when company is coming doesn’t need to be an unfixable emergency. This one can be a pretty quick fix without having to dismantle the chair. If the leg or spindle is loose but still a tight fit, just turn it in such a way the the glue is drawn in by gravity. Add a couple of drops of Mister Glue. It will wick in and within a few seconds the chair should be solid again.

If there is a bit of a gap you will have to use a filler with Mister Glue as on its own it will not do the job. If there is very little space, use some baking soda as a filler. If there is enough room, use some sawdust.Tap in whatever you are using until packed fairly tight. Then add a few drops of Mister Glue. It will go hard very quickly. No more loose chair legs.

Everything is Made of Plastic

Cheap Cheap. Toys would often be way too expensive if they were made of metal or wood. Plastic toys are cheap but often difficult to repair. Mister Glue will repair most and with the more difficult ones, you can add in the Accelerator. Please check the directions on how to use both together.

Refrigerators can be packed enough without loosing a shelf to a crack or break. Often tough to find replacements. Use Mister Glue with a filler to permanently repair. There are instructions on this elsewhere on this website.

All kinds of other plastics in the kitchen, the weather stripping of the refrigerator or microwave, the plastic handle of the microwave, plastic fixtures… and we haven’t even touch upon PVC!!

All your plastic plumbing pipe(PVC) can be easily and instantly repaired with Mister Glue. You can glue two pieces end to end and they will not come apart for anything. To test this I have glued two pieces of white PVC pipe together and let them set for a couple of hours. Tight fit remember. Then taken a hammer and smashed it - every time I did this it would break somewhere else than where is was repair. We have used fillers on a hole in a pipe and added a few drops of Mister Glue and it stayed sealed even when the pressure of the water was coming through.

There are some things that you might not want to repair around the house as they will look repaired and there is often nothing much you can do about that. But if you need something fixed around your household, don't hesitate to try Mister Glue first.

Have fun!!

Jul

2018

Fillers for Household Items

Mister Glue, Fillers and Household Repairs

One of the wonderful things about Mister Glue is its simplicity of use. Epoxies on the other hand can be a pain to use. They can be very messy. A small drop of Mister Glue applied to a loose piece of household furniture will fix it in a jiffy.

But if you are trying to fix that old rocking chair with the loose spindle, stretcher or leg and there is a gap, you will be tempted to take it apart, make a mess in the house by getting epoxy all over the place and trying to fix parts that really don’t need fixing. Epoxy will fill the gaps but you can end up doing a lot more work than necessary.

That’s where Mister Glue can be used with a filler. You don’t have to remove the loose spindles even if there is a small gap.

Various sorts of materials can be used as fillers with Mister Glue. Sawdust with wood gaps; baking soda with a hole or crack in for the PVC pipe under the sink in the house or RV.

Mister Glue will work with almost any material: sawdust, course or fine, baking soda or even coffee. I’ve used coffee to get a good colour match. I’ve not tried them, but I imagine that you could use powdered paints to get a perfect match on that cracked vase in the living room.

As I have mentioned, Mister Glue is an amazingly fast and strong glue. But you need the pieces to fit closely together. Again, the better the fit the better the bond.

Occasionally, something like epoxy will be better as you have more working time. Mister Glue is very fast. I always suggest that one practice putting the pieces together before applying the glue. The less sliding around you have to do, again, the better the bond. But, what do you do if you are left with a gap or holes after you have bonded the pieces of your project together? This can happen because small chips have gone missing or with some plastics, bending is inevitable.

One you have put your project together, you can use the baking powder or sawdust or whatever else you choose, to fill the gap. Place the powder or baking soda into the space that needs filling. Add several drops of Mister Glue. Enough so that it soaks all the way in. It will go quite hard in one or two seconds. If the space that you are filling is a bit larger or deeper, like a screw hole that you are rebuilding, then you may need to build it up gradually. Once properly set, you will be able to scrape or sand smooth. It will not stain, in the case of sawdust with wood repair, but you can paint over it.

If you are concerned about colour, you may want to take a piece of wood or something put some of the powdered material that you are using and put a few pinches of it on that surface. A quarter or half a teaspoon would be plenty. And a few drops of glue. You should really start with one drop to get the idea of how deeply it will or won’t go. See how quick it is and if, for this material that you are using for a filler, does it alter the colour in any way? It many lighten up a little when dry but not always.

For plastics, we used baking soda. This was a shelf in a refrigerator that was broken when we moved into our new house. Being difficult to replace and rather expensive when I did find it, I decided to try to repair with Mister Glue. I also was very interested in how this would work. There were several spots missing(holes) once the crack was glued back together. I didn't want all of my home made condiments(the mango chutney is great!) falling on the floor at some inopportune moment, so I added some baking soda and glue for a little extra insurance.

In this particular case I was a lot less concerned about how it looked than how it held. For both the survival of my jams and chutneys and so I could show y’all how the fillers work with the glue! The spot where the shelf is cannot be seen anyway, unless you get down on the floor and look up at it.

As of this writing, the shelf has been functioning quite well(and believe me, I am not careful with it - it takes a beating!) for about 3 months or so. I do check it now and again and there is no deterioration at all in the glued joint.

Household Solutions: Experimenting

If you are in the shop or have a workspace in the house and want to experiment, take some various coloured powders from around the household or shop and put a few pinches on a piece of wood or plastic. Add a drop or two of Mister Glue(or enough so that it soaks the entire bit of powder) and see how the colour comes up and how it sets. If you start with one drop, you will see how deep into the powder it goes. It will harden up pretty fast, so then try a couple of drops with the same volume of powder to see that it will go deeper. This will help in judging how much powder and glue to use when you are fixing that wobbly rocking chair.

To get a nice match on materials, we have taken a piece of what we are trying to repair, ground it up and used that for a filler to get a better match on colour and sometimes more importantly, texture. We have used this technique for plastics and granite for example.

I always suggest that you experiment first before you finalize. Make sure that the filler that you have created will set properly and colour and texture are what you want.

The applications you can use for fixing stuff around the household are endless.

And don’t forget crafts!! There again uses are endless!