Glueing tubes in acrylic

[bhenr99]

New at this and have a couple questions.

1 - Do you always have to paint either the blanks or tubes?

2 - Will 2 part epoxy hold tubes from coming loose when painting tube
or blank when using paint?

Thanks for any help.
Bob

 

[Monty]

I paint both the inside of the blank and the tubes. Epoxy should hold. I use thick CA myself.

 

[Texatdurango]

Originally posted by bhenr99

New at this and have a couple questions.

1 - Do you always have to paint either the blanks or tubes?

2 - Will 2 part epoxy hold tubes from coming loose when painting tube
or blank when using paint?

You don't HAVE to color your tubes, I never do, and instead I enhance the blank with a little added shimmer.

Rather than paint I use epoxy and mix in a very small amount of Pearl-Ex metallic powder to make the color I desire. No hassle, no glue marks, no bubbles AND it adds some pizzas to your pen blanks.

The two pens in the photo have the exact same blanks, the one on the left had a little turquoise powder mixed with the epoxy, the one on the right had white diamond powder mixed in the epoxy.

This stuff is very reasonable and can be found at Hobby Lobby and other craft stores.

Below the bottle is a sample stick I made showing the colors I have (there are more). This powder, mixed with epoxy or CA can also be used to add decorations to pens as shown on the sample rod.

 

[Rudy Vey]

If the acrylic is very transparent, I paint both tubes and blank, if it is non-transparent, I just paint the tube. I found I get best results when painting both, I normally apply at least two coats to the blank and one to the tubes - here I can control how uniform the paint layer looks, I cannot do this in the drilled blank hole, though, thats why I use two coats.
Having made a lot of these in the last years, I can say I never had a blank fail, i.e. a glue joint come loose. The glue used is 5 min epoxy from Devcon, the best epoxy I ever used.

 

[kirkfranks]

Originally posted by Texatdurango
AND it adds some pizzas to your pen blanks.

Where is Cav?
I usually get my pizzas with sausage

Actually that is a really good tip. I may try it.