Wednesday, October 31, 2018

Hot Glue Gun projects

You can get a cheap glue gun for about $3 to $6 and about 24 to 100 glue sticks for $3 to $4. You can get it for a lot cheaper if you get coupons from JoAnn and Michael’s.

So for a little under ten bucks ($10!) you can make yourself a lot of need projects. These projects let you glue googly eyes on felt and bond together woods, plastics, cardboard etc to make easy projects without using nails or screws and hinges.

The only downside with the glue gun is it can get very hot and you have to be cautious around the hot glue if you’re not careful. I remember working on a glue gun project as a kid and getting burnt on the hot glue or a hot glue gun as a kid while building a colored pyramid. To this day I still have the scar from the project. So it may be something you might want to warn kids if you’re doing projects with them.

You have to let the glue dry before touching it. I have tried using it to bond certain projects and it can make a nice film to keep phone cases somewhat together if they have cracked but the glue hardens relatively fast if exposed to cool air and becomes like a plastic solid instead of liquid so when you are trying to bond two pieces there’s still a tiny bit of imperfect separation. You can spread the layers pretty thing so it’s like a peelable skin. The hot glue also can form stringy strands.

These tools sort of remind me of early versions of makerbots and wired filaments for the 3D printable printers because you can make relative hard solid objects from the use of these glue guns and glue sticks.

Also if you are using them for wood projects it allows you to have a somewhat solid surface to drill screws and certain nails into.

Since they are relatively cheap to own it is nice to have handy around the house.

The only other issue is that if you use them for an extended time there is small plastic smell associated with heating up the plastic.