I recently had the pleasure of meeting John & Vivienne Bristol from the UK's Deluxe Materials while they were traveling the USA and meeting with their distributors. Deluxe has quickly become one of our best selling hobby product lines because of their reputation for innovative, world class modeling products. John was showing me how to use some of the newer products they have when we came across Tricky Stick. When we first received this product I didn't give it much of a look, thinking it was simply a tacky glue and boy was that a mistake. What it is, is a surface primer for polythene and polypropylene plastics (and others) that allows CA glue (a.k.a. cyanoacrylate or super glue) to bond difficult shiny plastics. Tricky increases the versatility of CA as a glue and also improves it's strength.
Tricky Stick vs. Soft plastic figures (in this case Airfix)
Ever since Airfix first produced their figures the issue of glue has been a problem. Airfix made their own brand glue, which was your basic polystyrene (model) cement. This worked well for the hard plastic that kits are made out of as it, but on the soft plastic figures it could not penetrate the surface and the bond was very weak. Since some Airfix figure sets, particularly the cavalry, really require gluing this was a big drawback to their product and these old figures defy assembling. Of course we now have an answer to this...Tricky Stick & Super Glue.
First up I tried gluing a Airfix cavalry figure from the 1960s to the horse and then the horse to the base. A dab of Tricky Stick on each piece. A drop of super glue, let cure (dry) for a few hours and...end of problem. Perfectly mounted and based cavalry!
Next up I hacked up a couple of Airfix foot figures, swaped the torsos, added a dab of Tricky Stick on each piece then a drop of super glue, let cure (dry) for a few hours and...
2 minutes to a completely new figure
Michael Smith wrote on our Blog….
I got my bottle a few weeks ago and can't recommend this enough! It's what I've been waiting for since my Dad brought home my first Airfix figures from a trip to England in 1965. So far I've used it with great success on Hat figures (both their original plastic and the more recent softer kind) as well as Airfix, Zvezda, and Italeri. Just be careful of the fumes.
This stuff really works!
you can read my articles on Tricky Stick here:
http://michtoy-from-the-front.blogspot. ... h?q=tricky