Spokane & BC Railway Circa 1955

Modelling what might have been in southeast BC and northwest Wasington

Month: November 2020

White glue comparison

I always thought that all Poly Vinyl Acetate (PVA) “white” glues were equivalent. Here in Canada the most common brand is LePage “Multi-purpose white glue”, while in the USA it is probably Elmer’s “Glue-All”.

I have both and was interested in which might be better for gluing ballast and scenery materials. To see if there was any obvious difference, I poured a small amount of each onto a plastic lid and let them dry. After one day, I was surprised to see a very marked difference between the two glues. You can see it in the photo.

Both were peeled off of the lid and flexed. The LePage immediately snapped in two, while the Elmer’s simply bent. I left them for a few more days to see if the Elmer’s would dry out some more and become brittle, but after many days it is still very flexible.

Exactly how this will affect their use as a scenery glue is not clear to me, but I would think that a little flexibility for scenery would be a good thing, so I’ll keep using Elmer’s as long as I can get it.

Removing email subscriptions

I have decided to remove the email subscription feature from my blog, and instead simply post links to future updates on my Facebook feed. The idea of email notifications is a good one, however the facility in WordPress for doing this will work only for those emails that have been explicitly set up with WordPress. This is OK for many people, as they already have such a subscription from following other WordPress blogs, but it is an added step for those that do not, and may be something they are not interested in doing. Also, there was a grand total of seven people subscribed, so this change will not affect many people, and most of them are already friends on Facebook.

There are other options, such as MailChimp, but that service requires exposing too much personal information that I am not willing to do.

So, in the interests of keeping everything as simple as possible, I will simply post a link on my Facebook feed to all new blog posts on the website. If you are not friends with me on Facebook, you can either send me a friend request, or simply check the web site every so often.

I could dispense with the blog altogether and just post content directly to Facebook, however I want to maintain control of the content by having it hosted on my own web site with just links to it from elsewhere.

This post should go out to the existing email subscribers, and after it has been sent I will disable the email subscription feature.