While researching UV curable resins the other night, I happened upon an interesting product on Solarez’s website about using UV curable adhesives for fly tying. The stuff comes in a small squeeze tube, comparible in size to the small superglue tubes sold in most stores. In the video on their website, the person tying the fly places a blob of the adhesive onto the fly and then uses a UV dental light to cure the blob of gel. This adhesive in particular appeared a similar viscosity to the superglue gel we use for attaching coral frags to frag plugs and I wondered: could we use something like this for attaching coral frags to plugs and speed up our fragging sessions?

The Solarez fly tying product would not work in our application as the resin must be exposed to UV light to cure the blob of adhesive. Any residual gel under the frag would not cure. However, I remember from my past UV formulating career that there are UV curable cyanoacrylates that not only cure by typical means (weak bases, such as water), but it can also cure using a UV light source. A quick Google and Ebay search turned up a number of light curable cyanoacrylates, which might work (depending on the photoinitiator present in the glue) in conjunction with a dental UV light source, which is ~405nm. The cost of the cyanoacrylate is comparable to the gels we use for fragging. However, the UV light source (available on Ebay) runs around $90-$110.

What do you think? Would this idea speed up your fragging sessions?