Good Bonds

April 14, 2026 Stuff

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.

bond

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.

Comments

Engine — April 19, 2026 at 5:31 AM

Yes that is useful. Since you specifically asked for suggestions: Since i am mostly searching for myself (but also in a professional environment, where e.g. woman are not allowed by law to handle the adhesive) most important for me (more than performance) is that the adhesive is not carcinogenic / toxic to the environment / toxic to pregnant women etc. In the end i mostly check if it only has the „!“ warning symbol and not any of the other ones. Maybe a filter like this could also be useful to more folks, who like to work with safe materials? Just as a suggestion. Its a cool, useful and fast site as is.

David Hansen — April 30, 2026 at 12:26 AM

Hey Ben, love the tool site, which is your preferred adhesive these days for bonding magnets to rotors? UPDATE: I see you literally have this as an option in the tool, awesome

Ben — April 30, 2026 at 3:05 AM

I've actually never used Loctite AA A-671 (the only adhesive on the site I have NdFeB data for). I'll give it a shot next time :) I've used Loctite AA 325 & AA 326 (acrylic adhesive w/ primer, fast cure), also Loctite EA E-120HP, and 3M DP460 (epoxies, much longer fixturing time, pretty similar to each other).