On Contact Cement
This past weekend I had my first encounter with that universal construction adhesive - contact cement. The way it works is that you slather the two surfaces you wish to connect with coats of this odorous mucus, let it half-dry, then push the two besnotted surfaces together. Done. Glued.
I learned several things in the two hours that I used doing a fifteen-minute job.
Contact cement gets on your fingers. It half-dries there, and on the putty knife and the screwdriver and the dropcloth and the unwieldy thirteen square feet of laminate that required opening the Pandora's Can of Weldwood in the first place. At one point I had half the toolbox dangling from my fingers - the fingers that weren't glued to each other that is. Edward Handyman.
Fortunately the bond to living human flesh is marginally weaker than that flesh, and if you move slowly enough you can pull the glue off in a sheet. Like memories of summer-vacation sunburn, or more precisely like those drugstore-brand imitation Band-Aids with the forever stickum on them. (I think in retrospect that it's contact cement.) My sisters and, mercy, my mother were Rippers. They liked to remove those cheap bandages in a quick yank. Well, tehy didn't have arm hair. I was (in direct filial rebellion) a Slow Puller; I exerted minutes of slow traction on the Band-Aid, causing it to reluctantly release single arm hairs and sixteenth-square-inch parcels of skin pulled into a hooked triangle like the opening of Hawaii Five-Oh. But the hairs and skin stayed intact, unless there was a fortuitous sunburn there to allow "cheating". Keep the tip.
I rediscovered Slow Pulling in my garage, extricating myself from my gummed tools and then using liberal sploshes of mineral spirit to un-gum the screwdrivers, putty knives, and wife's favorite kitchen chair pressed in unsuccessful secret into hazard duty as an improvised sawhorse. (Next time, unupholstered, Dude.)
I will approach the archetype of Contact Cement with much greater care the next time. I believe that it is a many-faceted and durable metaphor for matrimony. It permeates the being.
Both sides must accept the glue. Compatibility is important; Read The Can First. Don't rush into this or you'll be sorry. The glue must be applied only after material and mental preparation. And the moment the two sides are touched - nothing, Nothing will get them apart. Save death or a really uncontrolled house fire. I believe that the two pieces can be separated - in theory at least, but it is a destructive process that will leave the two halves almost unrecognizable. And each half will get fifty percent of the other; it's physics and not State Law at work on this one.
Can you just see me in the garage with a gluey countertop, thirty-second bonding window closing FAST, maneuvering a great flapping Manta ray of Formica into approximate superposition over same, feeling the glue creep onto my fingertips? And not realizing until later that I'd just ruined a good shirt? (My God, I should have had a Best Man handy.) I did get the Formica down onto the counter. And I ALMOST put it into the right place, too! But Contact cement is Forever, and that one-eighth inch of oops, missed is going to be a permanent fixture on my newly-laminated bench. I'm not divorcing the bench. In fact, by an act of deliberate character building, I'm not going to pay Any attention to that missing eighth-inch, you look just fine, Honey. In time it'll grow on me and become a feature, a little private article of shared humor.
Contact Cement is truly not for men who are afraid of commitment. |
