Wire & superglue

[Purple Fencer]

Having a vexing problem here.

I've always used Superglue to wire my blades (both foil & epee). Until recently, I used French tips on my foils and have had no probs with the wiring. However, I have recently made the switch to German points, and am doing armoring for my club as well, where German points are by far the norm.

Here's the prob.

Many of the wire jobs I've done for teammates have had to be redone recently. The consistent problem is the loss of insulation on the wire right in the middle of the blade. Is it possible that the superglue I'm using is destroying the insulation? The insulation is blue (I get my wires from The Fencing Post), and comes off very easily with one or two swipes of fine sandpaper.

I use several different brands of superglue....basically whatever's available. Do I need to use a specific brand, or do I need to start using regular blade glue?

[Boo Boo]

In my experience (okay, my husband's - I am not big on armoury...), super glue is not the best thing for rewiring blades (it tends to be brittle - less flexible - and doesn't hold the wire inplace as long as other glue).

My husband - and most of the armourers I know - use epoxy resin (you get two tubes different tubes and mix it together). A lot messier to put in and get out and takes a lot longer to dry, but a lot more durable (and you shouldn't get the problem with the insulation).

Boo

[sallearmourer]

Sam, it's not the Superglue. Check around the barrel theard on the blades for a small piece of thearding sticking out. When pulling the wire though the barrel it should move freely. Some is striping the insulation.

Now I have used superglue in the past but have change to a CA type of superglue which you can pickup at a Hobby store that sell models. Names it can go under is Jet, Parfix101 the CA glue comes in three thickness thin med and heavy. Thin is great for foil blades just put it at the top and let it run. 1oz bottle should do about 100 blades. My overnight glue is the glue sold by American Fencers can't spell it. Been using it for 15 years.

Tim

Bomb them all and let God sort them out

[Purple Fencer]

Originally posted by sallearmourer:
<STRONG>Sam, it's not the Superglue. Check around the barrel theard on the blades for a small piece of thearding sticking out. When pulling the wire though the barrel it should move freely. Some is striping the insulation.

Now I have used superglue in the past but have change to a CA type of superglue which you can pickup at a Hobby store that sell models. Names it can go under is Jet, Parfix101 the CA glue comes in three thickness thin med and heavy. Thin is great for foil blades just put it at the top and let it run. 1oz bottle should do about 100 blades. My overnight glue is the glue sold by American Fencers can't spell it. Been using it for 15 years.

Tim

Bomb them all and let God sort them out</STRONG>

Hi, Tim.

Thanks. I've made the stripping mistake a few times in the past, so I try to NOT get anythingf caught in the threads.
IN fact, when I crank the barrel down, I've only got a couple of inches of wire pulled through, so if I DO catch the insulation, it's down where I'm going to trim it short anyway. I also make sure point's completely installed and the circuit is good BEFORE I lay in the glue.

The bare insulation ends up in the middle of the blade, but nothing's exposed when I glue it. Also, I pull the wire tight and secure it around the tang BEFORE I put the blade in the wire jig that holds it bent, which pulls the wire down into the groove.

The only thing I can think of is the wire's coming up to the top of the grove and is hgetting exposed, then scraped and broken during blade actions. I mean, I'm charging people for the work, and I'm not going to give shoddy work to my teammates.

[swordsen]

Do you keep the blade bent untill the glue is completely dry?? (I expect you do but what you are describing often happens when people release the bend before the glue has completely set)
another option which works for me is to not really bend the blade much at all when glueing. a very slight bend, and running a toothpick after the glue is applied down the wire to make sure it is in the groove.
The last thing to look at is the groove itself. We got some blades last year where the groove was so shallow that we could barely get the wire in it.
good luck

[sallearmourer]

Sam,

Swordsen is right about the groove in the blade. Some of the Leon Blade as a shallow grove. What I do is run my dermal down the grove and cut it a little deeper. I get from Harbor Feight diamond dust coated blades. The bend in the blade should be about three to four fingers width. to large of a bend can cause the wire to pop 0ut when use. Now also I ran into a bad batch of Super Glue last year and had wires poping out on me. None of the pepole it happen to told me and are down on my work at Nac I found out from a third party. So Super Glue can go bad. That why I switch to the CA base glue Its more expensive per oz then requaler Super Glue but its purer. Its like 7.00 for 1oz bottle.

Tim

[neevel]

Tim's on target-- sound's like the groove's a bit shallow _or_ it may not be getting totally cleaned of debris (which would prevent the wire from seating fully down). Getting a clean groove is the main determining factor in how well the glue holds-- far more so than what particular kind of glue you use.

Also, the cloth insulation on German wires has that little bit of varnish on it, so it doesn't 'wick' up the glue like French wires-- you may need to use just a tad more glue to get a good hold on the wire.

If you get a small plastic dish scraper the next time you're out grocerey shopping, you can use the edge of it to help push the wire firmly down in the groove before glueing (since it's soft plastic, it won't nick the insulation the way a screwdriver used for that purpose it liable to). This will help you spot places where it's not going to seat down far enough.

Most of the folks I've worked with armoring at NACs use some of the various hobby-grade cyanoacrylates. Cyanoacrylate is the active ingredient in all superglues, but the brands sold in hobby shops come in a variety of viscosities and curing times that are often better suited to blade wiring than the stuff you find at the supermarket.

The really thin, instant cure stuff ("Zap CA" is the best known brand, many places sell a house-brand equivalent) is what I use for doing foil blades. It's almost water thin and will cure in a matter of seconds (though it's best to leave the blade bent in the jig for a couple of hours for maximum strength if you've got the time). The rub is that because it's so fluid you do need to exercise some care in using it to avoid running it into the point or glueing the wire to the tang. With the blade bent, hold it point up and run glue a few inches down from the bottom of the barrel-- invert the bent blade it and let it dry for a few seconds. Repeat the same operation for near the tang. Then glue the middle and let it dry inverted.

For epee blades, I prefer the thicker, gap filling stuff (Zap-A-Gap or the like), which cures more slowly but fills around the dual wires in the wider groove better than the thin CA. There's even a "Flex-Zap" CA that retains a fair amount of flexibility when cured.

Cyanoacrylates do have a shelf-life. After a bottle is opened, it'll slowly absorb moisture from the air, which will cause it to partially cure in the bottle. So unless you're doing blades in the numbers that Tim does at nationals, you're best off buying several small bottles rather than one big one. I once had a run of club blades that didn't stay glued when I used an old bottle of CA that had started to go thick.

-Dave

[Purple Fencer]

Y'know, the responses I just got certainly go a long way toward countering the FS assertion that you can't get any useful info on THIS board ('Course, most of the folks who post here are generally an intelligent lot).

Going down the list...

Swordsen: Apparently, I'm unaware of the curing time for superglue. Then again, my own experience has been 1) wire my own blade and 2) end up not using it for a few days immediately arfter completing the reassembly. That probably gave sufficient curing time, and I was un aware of it. The problem baldes I'm been doing recenrly were all done a day or so before an event (Sam, help! My wire broke and I've only got one working weapon for the tournament tomorrow!), and were put in use within a half hour of the job being completed. The fact that my own blades have not had this problem seems to confirm that I need to make sure other people's blades sit longer. Generally, what's agood length of time to wait?

I have not encountered the shallow groove problem...or maybe I have and just thought I'd botched the job. Now that I think about it, I've noticed some of the wires above the blade surface on FL blades back near the tang. My LPs don't seem to have that prob, tho'

Tim; Well, you finally justified my purchase of a Dremel I did about 2 years ago. I'll look for those blades. Any particular width, or are they all the same thickness?

I had NOT considered overbending the blade, but now that I think about it, it makes sense. 3-4 fingers? Sounds like around 3" of bend at max, correct? Does the same hold true for epee as well?

Neevel: I try my damndest to get debris out of the groove. I tend to drop a blade in my acetone tube when I leave for work and remove it when I get home...or sometimes I forget it's in there. Either way, it usually gets at least an 8 hour bath. I also run a razor blade down the groove, just in case something doesn't come out. I've noticed that the very ends of the groove can still get clogged.

Thanks for all the tips, guys. I'll definitely look into it!

[edew]

I find razor blades to be too thin to do a good job of removing kruft from the groove. I use a jeweler's screwdriver with a fat enough head to do that. It's also the sam screwdriver I use to set the wire in the groove. Neevel might argue that I could nick some of the insulation off the wire, but that screwdriver's been doing this job for about fifteen years, so it's pretty smoothed out.

I use Cementit. People don't like it because it takes a long time to dry and because it's a thick glue. I use it because I'm used to it. I'm reading all these little tricks about inverting the blade and such to deal with a very fluid, watery glue. I'd rather deal with a glue I can control, and Cementit is it. Sure, it takes a bit longer to set the glue in the groove, and a bit longer to dry, but I'm not doing this for twenty other fencers. I used to wire all my blades, then I got Saul (TFP) to do them, but I'm thinking of doing them myself again. Saul's got other things on his plate.

I don't know if it's worth explaining my method, since it really wouldn't work (efficiently) for mass glueing work. But, I thread the wire into the barrel first, about 95% in, leaving about 3" left above the top of the barrel. I then put a dab of glue on the thread, seat the wire firmly in the groove around the thread, screw down the barrel a bit. Then I check that the wire can still go in and out of the groove smoothly. If I feel a snag, I take everything out, check (and possibly discard) the wire, file out any nicks at the thread area of the blade, and resume.

Once I get the barrel on tight, I pull (and push) the rest of the wire in and seat it comfortably with the cup setter. Then I put in the spring, tip, screws and do a preliminary check that I didn't accidentally pull the wire too hard and pulled it out of the cup. Also, by putting the tip in with the spring, it will keep pushing the cup into the barrel to seat it firmly in there. (I used to not do this and after a few hits, I noticed the wire bunching up near the barrel, so I guessed that I didn't seat the cup in completely and now there's extra wire.)

Next, I put some tape at the tang end of the blade, draw a bead of glue down the groove. I then grab the wire, and pull it down into the groove, using the smoothed out screwdriver to seat the wire in completely. Glue will squish out the sides of the wire around the blade. Oh yeah, the blade's securely fastened in a vise.

When I get to the end, I wrap the tape around twice, bend the wire back 180-degrees, wrap the tape around it some more, then wrap the wire around the tape. If you don't do the 180-degree thing, then when you go bend the blade, some of the wire will be pulled through the tape, again giving you some loose wire.

Then, I go over the groove with my fingers or screwdriver (I now wear latex gloves while doing this) smooshing the tacky glue back into the groove, pushing the wire in deeper.

Then I do the bend thing and let it sit for about two days like so. When I get the blade out of the bend, I scrape off the glue and voila.

Obviously, this isn't a very efficient process, but the wires don't pop and I don't have grounding or broken lines.

[neevel]

Sam-

For 'gotta be ready in 30 minutes' rewires, the thin, fast-cure CA is definitely the ticket. Also, you can get spray-on curing accelerant at hobby stores (Zip-Kicker is the Zap brand) that'll nearly instantly cure any cyanoacrylate. As I mentioned above, even without the accelerant, just an hour or two will let Zap CA get to full strength (probably less, actually).

BTW, the chief reason for bending the blade is to pre-tension the wire to make it less likely that you'll get a break (especially at the solder joint in the point) when the blade flexes. So you do want to bend it instead of wiring it flat. However, as Tim stated, too much bend makes it more likely the wire will pop out.

Lastly, a dab of the thicker, gap-filling CA + curing accelerant can be an effective field-fix for a spot of broken insulation. It won't last forever, but it should get you through the tournament.

-Dave

[Purple Fencer]

Thanks!

Maybe the next time I go to a large event, I should volunteer at the armory table for a day.

What kiiiiind of fooooool am Iiiiii...

[Miep]

Hi Sam,

Sorry for the off topic post, but when will the results page of the SoCal website be updated?

[sallearmourer]

Sam if you drop in at Plam Spring come by my booth for a Hour. I do more in hour than most pepole do in a month. Anybody get fix a problem by rewire the real trick is fix it without a rewire. But the first 3 days at Nat this year I did 60 on day one alone.

TIm

[Purple Fencer]

Miep: I FINALLY got the results from Father Calhoun last week, but my new business has taken up a lot of my time. One of the SwordPlay parents graciously volunteered to enter the date for me,m so I should have them up sometime this week.

Tim: I'll be there! Most likely on the Sunday, unless something else crops up first!

[sallearmourer]

Another thing go to your deneist for some of their bronken probes and file them down works great in cleaning out a foil blade. Nice high quailty steel.

Tim

[DamedEscrime]

Hey, I found some of those dental tools at a flea market for a buck. They are terrific for cleaning foils!!