Important: Safety Warning
This page describes practices involving highly flammable materials in ways that create a serious risk of fire or explosion.
This page describes trade processes that use dangerously toxic materials such as cyanide solutions, mercury amalgams, or strong acids. These processes require training, equipment, and precautions far beyond what the text describes.
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Adhesives, Paints, and Varnishes: Rubber
Rubber Cement. - The ordinary rubber mending tissue is a convenient article for repairing cloth, and also for flexible rubber surfaces, as hot-water bottles and the like. Use this mending tissue for umbrellas, raincoats, and similar articles requiring a tight waterproof joint. Lay the mending tissue over the break or tear. Place on the other side a piece of the same fabric and press lightly with a hot iron.
To mend a hot-water bottle, heat an artificial rubber band or a piece of pure rubber with hot iron, as a poker, until it becomes sticky, and lay it quickly over the hole or crack..
Let dry before using. Rubber overshoes can be mended in the same way. But hot-water bottles will keep longer and not require mending if emptied, dried, blown up, and corked tightly before they are put away.
Or apply a patch of oiled silk by means of mending tissue and a hot iron, but do not use the iron hot enough to melt or injure the rubber.
Or dissolve 1 ounce of gutta percha in pound of chloroform. Wash the parts to be cemented with a dilute solution of caustic potash or soda.
Cover each freely with this guttapercha solution and let dry for half an hour. Then warm each surface in the flame of a candle and let dry under pressure.