Has anyone used hot glue - like we use for tip tops - to secure a stent or reel seat? Doing so would make future removal a lot easier than epoxy does. I suppose the stent or seat would need to be heated as well to ensure a good flow.

Another year has passed without any failures. viewtopic.php?p=96392#p96392
viewtopic.php?p=289496#p289496

5 minute epoxy can be loosened with heat.

It's too hot here to even think about using hot glue for rod building. Even the stuff designed for putting tiptops on makes me nervous.

Cheers,
Graeme

I've been experimenting with this stuff; got a fairly cheap 20w glue gun on Amazon and managed to glue on the downlocking reel seat end cap on my first reel seat replacement job. It was pretty strong ! I took the rod out and fished from my packraft on a day in the upper 80's / low 90's. Never had any issues with the end cap coming off.

I used a different glue (experimenting with Duco) for the rest of the work and was dissatisfied with how that turned out (the upper part of the seat started spinning), so I decided to go back and re-do that part of the job with epoxy. To get the end cap off I had to use a heat gun, and was pretty amazed at how much heat it took. I used the old boiling water / plastic bag trick to get the rest off.

Anyway, I find the primary disadvantage to using the hot melt stuff is that it seems to set really fast, like within a minute or two. For gluing on an end cap or a trim ring (or whatever they are called) that is probably fine, but for other purposes I like to have a little more time to twiddle with alignment.

I know there is supposedly high temp and low temp hot melt glue, and I was probably using the cheap low temp stuff. May I ask what brand glue gun do you use, and does it set fairly quickly ?

Well I gotta agree with archfly; if permanence and a long work period is advantageous, as it will be to some new builders, epoxy is a good choice..

Duco Cement, mentioned above, used to be a commonly used rodbuilding adhesive. As with any cement of this type, it is good to be sure the particular fiberglass isn't damaged by it. I have rods with components affixed by Duco and Seal-Al that are decades old. They can be the devil to remove, as I found out when I went to change one of a very few uplocking reel seat mounts to downlocking. Cleanliness of the surfaces to be bonded,along with a relatively snug fit, is important. Epoxy fills voids in mating surfaces much more readily and more easily overcomes other difficulties caused by contaminants or rough fitting.


I can see other potential working problems with thermopastic cements, but I think they are mostly a result of unfamiliarity rather than inherent difficulty. They are used in industry because they are fast and easy. For the same reason, they are used by amateurs and hobbyists in archery and multiple crafts, both decorative and modeling. I guess there is a learning curve, but the easily made mistakes are easily fixed. The common mistakes with epoxy--again, consider all the queries that come up here--are not nearly as easy to fix and sometimes a component has to be sacrificed in the process. You could misalign a real seat a dozen times until you got it right with hotmelt glue--all in less time than it takes to grind off a real seat.

I have no idea what brand glue gun I use. It could be any of a dozen or so my wife has for crafts. I don't fuss between low or high temp, either. We have bags full of both.

As for short work time, definitely a concern. I never use stents for reel seats and wondered if the work time would be sufficient to coat the length of the stent and insert it before some had hardened. If the OP has tried it, perhaps he can describe it. If I were doing it, I would make a good snug fit with a few grooves here and there. As long as the last inch or two were coated and inserted with all the HM liquified, the strength would be fine.

I shape my grips on the rod, so work time is an advantage in gluing on rings one at a time. Within moments I can check the security of the bond, and then, once turning the grip, if the bond doesn't fail under the pressure of coarse sandpaper, it's not coming loose fishing, either. But the short work time might not be sufficient for sliding on a preformed grip with an even spread of glue in the process.

That's an experiment for somebody else, and I am glad Odanta described his experiments. I looked at mine the same way and only suggested trying it in that mode.

Other than that, HM teaches you to prefit carefully and index the mating components so alignment is a step prior to gluing. There is plenty of time, for instance, to slide a reel seat or tiptop in place while watching that the temporary marks line up.

Like Archfly said, though, it would be hard to go wrong gluing a stent in with epoxy.