Hard tubes of glue

A couple of customers have called me this week to say that their tube of Stormsure Flexible Repair Adhesive appears to have gone white, waxy and hard. This is because it has frozen! Just warm it up to room temperature for a few minutes and it will return to the liquid state. We put our tubes in a cup of hot water. Normally it will go waxy below about 3ºC and get harder as the temperature drops. However once you have made your repair (let it cure at room temperature) the finished product will remain strong and flexible even when frozen.

A Happy Customer writes to me

Suggest you check out www.stormsure.com :  this is the site of a UK company that makes an excellent boot-and-fabric repair/adhesive thingy-in-a-tube.  It’s like, say, Shoe-Goo, or Plumbers’ Goop, but less viscous.

So far, this is unquestionably the best such product I’ve used.  (I’m 64, been riding motorcycles since I was 17–you do the arithmetic. I also hike, ski, canoe — not all at once, and not in the same place.)

My experience with this item:  This past summer, my daughter & I were hiking in the Spanish Pyrenees.  It was late July, but we met Scottish weather:  two-plus days of constant rain.  The trails turned into streams. C’était pas fun, as we say in Québec. We did a day in constant rain, 10 hrs on the trail, up 700 metres to a pass at 2900 metres, then down 1200 metres to the refugio.  I was wearing my very good quality Sportiva hiking boots, which had seen me through some very tough and wet terrain in Southern Africa, the Rockies, the SCottish highlands, and the Adirondacks in upstate NY.  BUT, over the years, I had seriously abraded the leather on the outside of my right boot, above the protective rubber rand — and the Scottish/Spanish streams-posing-as-trails soaked my right foot completely.  C’était pas fun, pas du tout, not at all.

So, we dried out after staying an extra day at the refugio, and changed our plans: we aborted our through-hike so that we could fix my boots, and took the bus to Torla, a small village near the entrance to the Ordesa Canyon Ntl Park.  Sublime place, and by now, it was sunny and dry.  Torla has several mountain shops.  We went into InterSport; I described my problem with my boot, and they sold me a tube of the Stormsure adhesive/repair plastic-in-a-tube.  Turned out to be absolutely brilliant:  squeezed on in a not-too-viscous-but-not-too-runny-either stream; I spread it out with a twig, carved flat, thin & flexible with my Swiss Army knife, and the Stormsure dried in two hours, and cured fully overnight.  I used my boots that days, and put on a second coat that evening, covering a larger surface.  The Stormsure remained more flexible than, say, Shoe-Goo, and held up with no problems at all in a further ten days of hiking on rough and rocky trails.  No rain, but this stuff effectively gave the abraded section of my boot a double layer of durable flexible plastic covering.  I hosed it down at home to check–no dampness inside, none at all.

Highly recommended.

Coming Soon… New Horse Rug Repair Kit

It is that time of year when ponies and horses have their rugs fixed up and put on them again. Horse Rugs get damaged quite easily, but now it is it much simpler for you to make repairs yourself. The Stormsure Horse Rug Repair Kit has sufficient materials to make several repairs. It includes :

• 2 x tubes of Stormsure Repair Adhesive ( a 15g tube and a 5g tube).
• 2 x Self adhesive PU patches.
• 3 x swatches of nylon fabric for large rips.
• A plastic spatula for accurately spreading the glue
• A pair of plastic gloves to keep your hands clean.
• Instructions and links to demonstration videos on YouTube.com

So now is the time to invest a few pounds in order to save a great deal more!

Buy online from the end of October at www.stormsure.com and we will send it to you by 1st class Royal Mail.

Watch the video to see how we make repairs.

Instant Waterproof Patch Repair Video

Here is the video for the new self adhesive patches showing how to repair a leak in an inflatable pool. These are available online at www.stormsure.com

Inflatable Pool Repair Patches – New! and very sticky…

 

Pack of 5 x 75mm waterproof patches

Stormsure’s new self adhesive patches are made from a tough polyurethane film, which is much more resilient than regular PVC patches. It is the simplest of jobs to apply one of these patches over a small cut or pin hole in an inflatable toy or the top inflatable ring of an above ground swimming pool. Once applied the leaking air is trapped where it should be – in the tube, and you can enjoy your pool without worrying that the water will gush out when you are not looking and the inflatable ring has slowly deflated.
The patches can easily but cut to fit awkward shapes if necessary. Just use a sharp pair of scissors. In fact the patches are of ample size and for many small repairs only a small area need be patched at all.  You can use these patches for hundreds of other jobs and make temporary repairs on tents, waterproof clothing, car soft roof material, plastic boots and waders and much more. See the video on youtube www.youtube.com/glueshop

 

 

New “How to Fix it” Videos now on Youtube

Watch our new videos and learn how you can make a permanent repair to a ripped waxed jacket in just a few minutes. Repair that paddling pool or above ground pool. Fix you rubber boots. It is all demonstrated on the videos.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/Glueshop” title=”Click here to see the videos” target=”_blank”>

Leak in the swimming pool?

A quick video I made yesterday showing how to make a simple and quick repair to the inflatable part of an above ground swimming pool.

You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/user/Glueshop#p/u/6/drGo8zywsj4

Favourite Boots in near catastrophe disaster

My daughter is pony mad. Not only is her room covered in pictures of ponies but her favourite gum boots are printed with pictures of ponies and they have been her pride and joy since Christmas. Only five months later – yesterday –  she came into the kitchen holding the boots with tears in her eyes and water in her socks. An inch long split has appeared on one boot, just where the boot bends when you walk.  I inspected the other boot and it too is going the same way in exactly the same place.

Last night I made a simple repair, in just five minutes, with a spatula and a small tube of Stormsure. I have covered all the areas that look as if they might split in the future too. Just a thick film of Stormsure is all you need. This morning they are ready to wear again. And you can hardly see the repair at all….Big smiles all round.

Wood Glue.

A colleague who has worked in the adhesives industry for many years has done some tests with Stormsure. He is looking for other opportunities for selling it and did some tests on a range of different materials. When he called me today he said that he was really impressed by how well it works with wood. On the four tests where he used Stormsure to bond wood together, he did destructive tests; in all cases the wood broke before the adhesive joint came apart. But not only that, Stormsure is particularly effective when there are sizeable gaps in the joints (usually from excessive wobble like a loose chair leg, or bad carpentry such as found in most of my wood working attempts…). As Stormsure is 70% solids, even when cured it has great gap filling properties. This is particularly useful when the wood is a bit warped as the gap widens with the curvature.   I have been repairing my beehives this week and Stormsure has done an excellent job on dozens of loose joints. It also keeps the joints waterproof throughout the year and I have full expectations that they will need no significant repair for quite a while.

Diver Dave’s Wader Repairs!

It is just days until the brown trout season opens – I am hoping to get out after Pike fairly soon however I have a bit of a problem – my waders have a bit of an evil leak in them. Not a horrific leak or anything but certainly a couple of creepers – one is right at my crotch as well so it means that any sneaky sessions after work will be hard to explain away.

So I was looking at the price of new waders in the Sportfish catalogue that thumped through my letterbox the other day. I nearly choked on my porridge – how much for a pair of waders? For the price of a pair of these waders I could put my car through its MOT and probably get some new brake pads (possibly). And remember the chances of these waders actually lasting a long time are somewhere between very slim and not at all – by a long time I mean more than a couple of seasons of serious fishing.

Leaky Waders Repaired with Stormsure

 

Sure my old Vision Endurance lasted a while however those bad boys had seen more Stormsure than…..well someone that likes sticky stuff: After mending my old ones at the crotch I then managed to fall over a barbed wire fence ripping big gashes down both legs – I mended them as well. Eventually I acquired a new pair of Scierra’s from the Glasgow Angling Centre – a trade for some advertising and they have been with me for a couple of seasons – however like I say they have been leaking – I just cannot face going at them with a torch and some Stormsure – I just know it will be the beginning of the end. However, I then learned of a certain Diver Dave who is fixing problems with waders before they even start sometimes: For the last few years I have been repairing anglers waders.

For many years I was a diver, running my own business. A large part of the business was dry suit repair, as they are very expensive and only last about 5-10 years. However like most anglers I found myself replacing my waders every second season. I decided to attempt to pressure test the wader’s using the same technique as I used for dry suits, and then to repair them to dive suit standards. I got a loan of all my friends waders, most of which had a leak or two and pressure tested them using compressed air. I found that they all leaked in the same places, and that the problem was always the manufacturing technique, they were simply not made to last, the seams, particularly in the crotch and feet being the common leak points. I then compared the seams of dive suits and waders and found that the taping was very poor, however this was an easy fix.

Diver Dave also has an absolute classic tag line – No one has a patch on us! Seemingly some folk send their new waders to him to have them sealed properly to ensure they do not actually start leaking. To cut a long story short I wrapped up my waders in a bag last week and am sending them off to Dave for a once off overhaul.