Trouble with glue

 I really am not on a good streak at the moment, so this is a bit of a rant. Partly over the poor quality of products nowadays, partly over my own incompetence.

It's been about glue this weekend. I need to fit the fuel filler bayonet to the filler neck, and since I can't TIG weld then glue is the only option. To be fair it kind of did work, although I question the longevity. I used epoxy to bond the two parts together, and yes it stuck but it was unfortunately off centre. So the cap wouldn't go on. I expected a struggle when taking it apart, but the fact that it just needed a bit of encouragement with a stanley knife makes me wonder how long it would last.

Once it was apart and cleaned up, I tried some JB weld. Turned out I'd not done enough, because it wouldn't even hold together under it's own weight. After a second clean up, I made a decent lump and applied it. I also clamped it in place and left it, I am hoping that patience is a virtue here and it'll be fine tomorrow. Or next week, depending on when I want to look at it again.

The other gluing job was the dashboard leather on to the blank. I bought the contact adhesive yesterday, thinking that my challenge would be getting it flat and whether it stuck to the leather. Turns out my problem was neither of those, it's the fact that it didn't stick to the blank! I noticed it when I was painting it on, it was going gloopy and dragging. I actually got to the point where there was a visible lump right above where the steering wheel would be, so that would have been horrible.

I prepared myself for a frustrating time getting rid of the glue, turned out that I need not have worried. It just peeled off. Now, I'm not an expert on glues, but when something peels off that easily, something has gone wrong. The leather looked ok though, it had wrinkled up a bit but had accepted the glue no problem.

So at the moment I've washed the glue off the leather and left it stretched flat to dry, and I'm wondering what to do with the blank. I don't want to strip the paint off completely but I think it's going to need more than a bit of sandpaper. I'm thinking perhaps a wire brush to actually score the surface which should hopefully keep things fairly smooth once it's done. 

And of course, I thought it was going to work fine first time, so I temporarily put all the wiring stuff underneath the board that I'd laid out... so no more wiring today. I don't mind to be honest, after such a bad start to the day I'm not in the mood for more garage work. I might go in there to tidy up in a bit, I need to get some stuff sorted/binned. In fact, yes I might do that as it's fairly relaxing, reasonably trouble free, and I could do with a win today.