The virtues of the cyanoacrylate, also known as cyano or super glue, all well known for modellers: It dries quickly and it can virtually bond everything.
However, the cyano is more difficult to control that its counterpart, the common cements used on styrene (the usual plastic used on scale models). Join that fact to its quick drying properties and its difficulty to be removed from plastic and you get an adhesive that can ruin a model in seconds...
The virtues of the cyanoacrylate, also known as cyano or super glue, all well known for modellers: It dries quickly and it can virtually bond everything.
However, the cyano is more difficult to control that its counterpart, the common cements used on styrene (the usual plastic used on scale models). Join that fact to its quick drying properties and its difficulty to be removed from plastic and you get an adhesive that can ruin a model in seconds.
Cyanoacrylate debounder
Considering the cyano as a sort of liquid plastic, its major enemy is the same that for most of the plastics: Acetone. Indeed, acetone can remove dried cyano from any surface... except from plastic, since acetone will damage it.
There are however some solutions in the market that allow removing cyano from plastic. They are specifically addressed to scale modeling and they are economically affordable. But what if we can do a home-made debounder by ourselves?
Home made debounder
The home made debounder introduced in this post is based on acetone but, instead of using pure acetone, a mix of acetone and another medium is made in order to remove the cyano without damaging the styrene.
The medium is mainly based on isopropyl alcohol but, to avoid its quick evaporation, a small amount of glycerin is added. In that way a more dense liquid is obtained, its evaporation time is reduced and therefore its effectivity increases.
Based on my own experiments, my home made cyano debounder recipe is:
- 67% pure acetone
- 16,5% pure isopropyl alcohol
- 16,5% pure glycerin
Applying the home made debounder
The way of doing to remove the excess of cyano with the above debounder is, by using a brush, applying debounder to the cyano to be removed several times while gently brushing the debounder on the cyano. I recommend using a hard brush insted of a soft one.
As the acetone is diluted with the medium to avoid damaging the plastic, the process is slower than applying pure acetone on cyano, that removes it in less than a minute. By using the debounder on plastic the process can take the order of 30 minutes or more.
{alertWarning} Bear in mind that some differences could be found depending on the specific plastic (styrene) used in the model, so the ratio between acetone and medium (in the above recipe 67% vs 33%) should be fine tuned before start removing cyano.
More medium is safer for plastic, but increases the removal time or even makes the debounder useless, wherease more acetone accelerates the removal time but also increases the risk of damaging the plastic.
 from plastic){kind=link}
0 Comments