Good Bonds

Adhesive bonds. Don’t worry, this isn’t becoming a finance blog.

I do a lot of bonding parts together between my work and personal projects. At this point I have some (I think) reasonable default choices - Loctite 401 or 380 for plastics and elastomers, Loctite E-20HP or 3M DP420 for rigid metal & composites, Loctite 648 for metal slip/press fits, etc. But for important or unusual things, it would be really convenient to have a tool to spit out different adhesive options for different materials and bonding condition, without having to work through product selectors from 6 different brands and endless TDS’s. There are a few guides that are really good, like the Loctite Design Guide for Bonding Plastics, which I find myself on around once a week, but nothing I’ve seen that compares across brands and many types of materials.

Well the future is now, here is that convenient tool:

adhesive.fyi

Basic features:

• Select the 2 substrates you’re bonding together, order adhesives by the lap shear strength on the weaker of the 2 substrates (or peel/impact)
• Filter by viscosity, service temperature, thermal conductivity, and other properties
• Select several adhesives and compare their properties in detail
• Link to the TDS or other resource the data came from for every entry

Notes:

• The data is compiled from many TDS’s and bonding guides. I haven’t checked every single entry, and the data is parsed from PDF’s so there may be mistakes. As the site says, always read the TDS.
• Strengths are only shown where a specific adhesive is tested on a specific substrate. Just because a strength isn’t listed for a substrate/adhesive combo doesn’t mean an adhesive won’t bond to the substrate: it just means I don’t have any data on the bond strength for that exact combination.

One example: Aluminum to Nylon bond. Top 3 adhesives (without any extra filters) are Loctite 380, Loctite 414, and Loctite 401 - all cyanoacrylates.

I would love suggestions for ways to make this more useful: specific materials/catalogs I should add, data I should add filters for, mistakes you notice, or anything else. Let me know down in the comments, or click the mailto link at the top right corner of the adhesive site.