i've had terrible luck with 2 part epoxies. i tried a half dozen brands over the years as a jeweler. they came in tooth paste tubes like jb weld and weird two chambered syringe things that were harder to get the same amount of. every time i used it it would either dry and only stick to one surface or never dry at all and peel off like rubber cement.

old jewelers called 2 part epoxy their "pearl hammer" because that's what you use to hold a pearl on a post. like i said it never worked for me, so after many years i just used super glue mixed with the dust from drilling out the pearl. i always redrilled the pearl (yup that big perfect pearl gets a hole drilled 1/2 through the back) and usually added a new thicker post. i started replacing the posts when QC kept ripping the thin factory posts off checking to see if the pearl was tight!

i'll also say i hate every other kind of glue or at least they hate me. i have super glued my hands together more than once! fingers together more than i'd like to say. maybe as a kid i should of ate some paste or not sniffed the markers.

all that said i need to use some kind of glue to hold metal to plastic. i'm talking about at a very small surface area as it is a 4" action figure hand. specifically it is a fn cat (mech?) robot hand with it's fingers removed. i've driven steel push pins in place where the 4 fingers would be. i plan on slipping some very thin plastic straw pieces over the cut to length pins. a steel claw will insert in the end of each straw as well. so it will need to bond to two kinds of plastic and 2 kinds of metal. all the pieces fit together and hold together ok. so the amount of space will be very small and not easy to get everything together fast.

any suggestions on a good pearl hammer? or why/how i'm doing it wrong?

or just stick with super glue? maybe find some kind of dust to put in it

smart arse remarks welcome too
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..we'll get to see who ate the paste that way.

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Frist, I've never had any permenant luck with any two part glues. At least not any better than the wya easier to use Loctite. I've also never had any luck permenantly securing metal to plastic with just glue. The only way it has ever worked for is drilling and screwing/pinning the metal to the plastic and using the glue as bonus adhesive security rather than the primary bonding method.

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I have had great results using small amounts of 2 part plastic resin that I use for casting parts as a glue. It ends up really solid.

It would be pretty expensive to just use it as glue though.

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Have you tried mixing baking soda (powder?) with the super glue?

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I've had some luck with the UV resin pens but the downside to them is you can't do a backer glue if the part(s) aren't transparent to UV, so you can only do the edges.

I started using the pearl dust after I read about baking soda and super glue on here. I haven't tried it at home though.

I have used uv glue. It doesn't seem to bond strong, but that might just be the ones I tried. My huge hovercraft wip has a bunch of uncured uv glue as I didn't grasp that my uv light didn't travel up into and around stuff.

I have used hot glue, even to the point of sculpting details with it. The black glue sticks I have are more like rubber. No way I could get it into the small area I'm needing though.

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I've had good luck with two part epoxies. I know the syringe kind can be a pain to get equal amounts, I'd suggest the kids that come in two seperate tubes. I've been using E6000 lately with good results, but the problem with it is it's really thick and gooey and doesn't have an applicator tip. You have to dump some out on a scrap of cardboard and use a toothpick to pick some up and apply it. You have to watch out for "strings" of glue forming though.

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I have some of that I think. It dries like a stiff rubber cement if it's what I'm thinking

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