Thread: Hot Glue guns?

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I am working on casting some parts out of hot glue. It's working good- except, every 3/4 of a glue stick I have to stop for 10mins (or more) and wait for the glue to heat up and melt again. I have a 'high temperature' glue gun, and think it's decent... the problem comes in where the 1st layer of glue is meeting up with the next layer- since it's at least 10mins apart, the 1st layer dries quickly. Where the 2 layers meet up, it leaves a line/seam in between, causing some problems.

I've tried forcing the glue through faster, but it just trickles out a little bit, before completely stopping.

Are there CHEAP continuous flow type glue guns out there, possibly available at Michaels or Hobby Lobby? Any other inputs for me?

A continuous flow (don't even know if they make these) would be perfect- I could just keep pouring as much glue in as I need, as long as I can keep loading sticks... Ideas???

I have a cheap Chicago Electric gun that I got at Harbor Freight. On the "high" setting it'll melt glue sticks as fast as I can feed them in. It's similar to this one:

- Harbor Freight Tools - Quality Tools at the Lowest Prices

but the handle is yellow. I don't know if the one in the link has two temp settings.

REALLY.... Man, it looks soo cheap! Now- when you say it will go as fast as you can load it... can you make a big flood/puddle of hot glue, or does it come out somewhat slow to where it's just a steady, slow stream? I need it to FLOOD out as fast as I can load it... does that make sense?

ok, the gun I'm using is a 40 watt. I wonder if I got a 80 or 100+ watt if that would melt the blue faster? Anyone know for sure??

Originally Posted by Specter

ok, the gun I'm using is a 40 watt. I wonder if I got a 80 or 100+ watt if that would melt the blue faster? Anyone know for sure??

Yes you are generally looking for wattage for amount of lbs of glue per hour. If you look at minions web cobweb shooters the ones that can produce more are the larger wattage ones. The 200watt unit is an adhesive tech 200, and I just picked up a brand new one on ebay for 10 bucks. I used the same last year for webs that i bought and made and I never had to wait for sticks to heat.

That's the one I was looking for as well- the AdTech 200. You say it doesn't have to wait at all? The glue will just FLOW out? Or, is it more of a slow steady stream?

Higher Wattage = Lower recovery time. 80 to 100 watts

Originally Posted by HomeyDaClown

Higher Wattage = Lower recovery time. 80 to 100 watts

And can you explain this to me in a scientific manor?

It is absolutely the opposite. The higher the wattage the higher the recovery time for a given volume of material. So then if I use a 1 watt heat gun I could melt 100's of pounds per hour of glue? If I say 1/2 watt the maybe 1000's of pounds......

Sorry to sound crass but it does defy logic and thermodaynamics

Watts = Heat / BTU/hr period i cannot give you the exact formula but thats why I have engineers. For any given material, it takes so many btu to raise temperature of a fixed amount of material so many degrees.

Originally Posted by Specter

That's the one I was looking for as well- the AdTech 200. You say it doesn't have to wait at all? The glue will just FLOW out? Or, is it more of a slow steady stream?

Keep an eye out on ebay, they do come up, but not often. I did a saved search in ebay which notifies me when one comes up. 3M also sells the exact same version in red. I tried it along with the adtech one for cobwebs, it looked exactly the same with same speck but i thought it was not as good as the adtech in capacity. I could be wrong as its subjective and maybe it was just its color, red.

I got a second recently so this year I can be a 2 gunslinger!

I went to the thrift store and got a cheap old pot and melted the glue sticks in that for making hands for props, works way better than any glue gun, at least for large things like hands.