Speaking of microeconomics…I just learned of a hack that can save some money at home or in a business. It started with an email from an esteemed friend who leads an interesting life as a welder/rigger/artist. He helped build some of the giant sets at the Burning Man festival which, well, burned. His inquiry, with some personal references edited out, went like this:

…At burning man i once watched a man save the day by patching a hole in the plastic gas tank of a golf cart with super glue, toilet paper and vinegar… Suddenly we had a functioning golf cart. Although I’ve never gotten to use this I remember this trick dearly.

Just today [my brother] was telling me about … breaking his glasses. …he had already fixed his glasses. How? He said “I’m pretty good at super glue and baking soda.”  …  He said the baking soda acts as an accelerant and gets very hard when you add super glue to it.

Being a chemical engineer by background, and always curious about household chemistries, this got me poking about the internet. Here is what I found.

The main ingredient in most repair superglues is ethyl 2-cyanoacrylate, along with some polymethacrylate gel and a little sulfonic acid, which acts as a stabilizer. When the superglue comes in contact with moisture, that triggers the polymerization reaction, so the glue solidifies and bonds to surfaces. It works best as a very thin layer squeezed between two closely fitting surfaces. Thicker droplets of superglue may be very slow to harden or not harden at all, towards the middle.

Thus, superglue is notoriously bad for filling in gaps or spaces or holes. For gap filling, you would normally turn to epoxy glue (for strength) or silicone (for flexibility). These glues have their own advantages and disadvantages. I don’t think that either silicone or common epoxy would stand up well to gasoline.

My internet research found that porous paper, like toilet paper, tissue paper, or paper towel, can catalyze the hardening of superglue. You can stuff a hole with a wad of toilet paper, or make a shape out of paper towel, and saturate it with superglue, and it will instantly harden. For the nerds among us, I will note that paper is mainly cellulose, which is a polymer of sugar (glucose), which has water type -OH groups sticking out all over, which harbor a surface layer of adsorbed water.  This YouTube video by Mr Made  has excellent examples of using porous paper for super glue to instantly fill in a hole or build up a solid shape.

It is critical to use freshly opened superglue, and use a thin runny liquid formulation which will quickly saturate the paper, not a thick gel type superglue.

It turns out that baking powder can be used instead of porous paper with superglue to fill in holes or cracks or make solid shapes. You can sprinkle in a thin layer of baking soda, then saturate that with the glue, then add another layer of baking powder and glue, etc. This YouTube video , by The Maker,  nicely demonstrates this technique.

So there you have it, hack away with your superglue.

Don’t Try This At Home:

The main loose end from my researches involves the role of vinegar in that fix of the golf cart fuel tank at Burming Man. Vinegar is usually mentioned as a solvent for superglue, and chemically vinegar is an acid whereas baking soda is a base, so vinegar seems like the opposite of an accelerant for the polymerization. I can only speculate that for making a very thick wad of paper plus superglue to fix the fuel tank, the vinegar may have been used deliberately to slow down the glue hardening a bit. But that is just a guess. I think the cyanoacrylate superglue would have a reasonable chance to withstand gasoline, but I sure would be nervous about relying on such a patch for a fuel tank. It would not take much of a gasoline leak to make Burning Man all that more memorable. Don’t try THIS at home.