Gluing, Sealing and Painting

Particularly regarding the gluing or bonding of wooden parts for ships or aircraft, one often hears hair-raising stories, yet there is only one correct answer: wood glue (white glue). Anything else is a waste of money and has no place in proper models.
Here, one should trust leading manufacturers and preferably use a waterproof white glue, such as Bindan D3 Propellerleim or Ponal Express.

A small tip: secure your glue supplies before winter. The delivery of these glues is no longer possible at temperatures below 0°C, as they could otherwise be damaged.

These glues have the advantage that they can be easily diluted with water for certain applications, allowing for better dosing. Excess glue can be easily removed with water as long as it has not dried.
Unfortunately, white glue takes about 12 hours to cure, and sometimes you have tricky areas to bond that cannot be held or fixed permanently. In such cases, we use superglue to fix the parts temporarily with small dots, and then fill the bonding surfaces with diluted white glue.
Medical-grade syringes with 1,2 mm needles are excellent for this purpose.

For hulls, especially in ship model building, which are built using the frames-and-bulkheads method, one wants to achieve high stability. Due to the many curved surfaces, the bonding areas are often not ideal. It is therefore recommended to coat the entire hull afterwards with thick resin. This fills any cavities and bonds the entire hull into a single unit.
For this, we use a 40-minute resin, which can be thickened with a thixotropic agent as required.
If additional stability is required in certain areas, it is possible to fill these in advance with resin thickened with cotton flakes. This is particularly helpful in the bow area or for engine mounts.