Glue for flocking

Frank BeFay

Active member
I have used rustoleum oil paint as glue. wondered if anyone has tried tried tite bond 3 as the glue or any other adhesives to flock on?
thanks!
 
Titebond III is NOT completely inert on re-exposure to water after it cures. I will become cloudy, indicating some level of reaction to water exposure. Does this impact its adhesion capabilities? I don't know, but I would not recommend it over Rustoleum as a flocking base adhesive. I usually just paint a section, glob a handful of material on it, and then "tap" the decoy body repeatedly over a garbage bag hung inside a collection receptacle to catch the excess that falls off. Two coats provides a dense flocking layer, plus this enables seamless repairs down the road.
 
thats interesting. i have seen foam decoys with several coats titebond iii then painted, seemed to be pretty strong. the ones i have restle coated with ground walnut shells are very strong and nice, the primer and paint protect the tite bond, as for flock, you and i are doing the same thing. a flower sifter and tap seems to get the best paint flock contact. i keep the paint a little on the runny side and put it on fast so the flock hits the paint as wet as possible. Question: on the second coat, do you find a thin layer of paint or thicker layer of paint over the first coat of flock provides a different finish, either better? thanks
 
nice looking with cork dust. i like the ground walnut shell look as well.
your in Marquette, i spent allot of time there during work. is lake superior the place to diver hunt? if not were do you go with your spread?
i live 2 miles from Green Bay, great place to hunt.
 
They are a little too abrasive. I will sand them with an 80grit pad between coats, when I make the remaining two. The balsa was from a WWII era life raft that was donated to the Marquette Maritime Museum. It was too far gone to restore and was going to be "pitched". I was able to salvage enough for seven bodies...with maybe another obtained via piecing. The balsa blocks were "pinned" together with dowels and what I think was polyester resin as a mastic. They were a bugger to grind, since the density block-to-block was not uniform.

Frank, old squaw primarily offshore, with a smattering of scaup, mergansers, redheads, and goldeneyes in the more protected bays on the Superior shore. Because of the limited access points to get to these bays, it is far safer to hunt the inshore lakes where migrating birds congregate during a storm front's passage. There are more access points on the Lake Michigan side, and a wider array of species, both puddlers and divers, so I often make the drive south.
 
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The process i used for walnut shells was simple, TBIII, pour on the shells, 100 grit light sanding, 2 more TBIII coats watered down a bit. primer paint. surface has texture but is not abrasive at all.
love the life raft story, had many rafts down by the bay when i was a child.
Spent about 10 years traveling from the Houghton area to Munising. got in on some nice fishing on the big lake and some streams. didn't get to the waterfowl, i have seen folks launching boats off beaches and such. must be the access you alluded to!!!!!
 
The hen canvasback bodies would still "oil can" slightly in spots after two coats of Titebond III with a cork dust layer, so I applied a third. I should have followed your lead and sanded between each coat-very hard to paint.

Did you get up to the Huron River for steelhead? Big Eric's bridge has a small campground site on the west side of the river just downstream from the falls. Brown trout fishing on the Sturgeon River is excellent as well as several smaller Lake Superior tribs. that I won't name to protect their fisheries. I used to own a camp southeast of the Baraga Plains near the major deer yard up there. We would start the deer season hunting the high country up by Mount Arvon and Mount Curwood by Herman, and then shift to the migration corridors that follow several stream courses when the snows would start pushing deer out. From the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula over to Chatham is the migration corridor for the Mississippi Valley Canada population, with most swinging down on your side of Lake Michigan on to Beaver Dam, Wisconsin. The Tennessee Valley flock comes through the U.P. from Munising over to the Soo, concentrating near Seney USFWS Refuge and the St. Mary's River corridor.
 
i have heard of the migrations. you would have a hard time telling it by wisconsin. deer here have stopped moving much in the winter. seem food is available and keeps em around. northern wisconsin has been low on deer for a while.... well since the NFS stopped logging. lot of local deer south.
 
RL, have you read John Ozogas book Whitetail intrigue?
John is a major WT researcher and has written several great books on the subject. Most of his research has been done at the Cusino wildlife area in the UP of michigan. Very well done material based on science, not hear say etc. I have read 5 of his books and really enjoyed the knowledge.
 
I used to give signed copies of it to deer hunter friend/customers as Christmas gifts. John was quite gracious and quite informative during the signing sessions when I would stop by his home in Munising. Deer and Deer Hunting editors compiled his articles into this text, probably one of the most definitive whitetail biology at northern latitudes compilations available. There is currently a winter habitat work group here in the U.P. of Michigan that has worked very hard to apply his research conclusion on the importance of Winter Deer Complexes, to save the "Green Barns" (John's term). To date, the Upper Peninsula Habitat Work Group has been able to map all the WDCs in the western and central U.P., compile a percent species array to match with GIS imagery, coordinated forest management plans on Corporate, National Forest, and State lands within these WDCs, as well as recently launching an outreach habitat management consultation initiative to Private landowners who own land blocks of forty acres or more inside the WDC boundary or within five miles of their exterior margins. Two mass mailings to private land owners have garnered sixty and 80 percent response rates, requesting on-site walk through and habitat management plan write-up.

The eastern U.P initiative is currently being mapped and planned. There are still several large blocks of northern white cedar in this area of the U.P.

A private forestland owner presented a quite ingenious germinated acorn planter that enables him to inject 600 oak acorns per hour at the spring UPHWG meeting. It is likely superior to broadcast planting efforts, since his technique enables the user to simply view the forest over story to select planting sites best exposed to incident sunlight. One forester observer offered a suggestion of PVC tube placement, both to deter grazing, but also to enhance soil moisture retention and improve the micro-climate around the seedlings.

John walked away from the MDNR because they would not focus on winter habitat enhancement issues that were looming...he was right.

The UPHGWG effort will eventually bear fruit, but not significant benefits to the current deer herd within my lifetime. We have a too high fawn predation via the canid predator load (coyote and wolves). Toss in 200" plus snowfall winters and diminished WDC size and individual habitat content quality issues and you have the broad causation issues that have brought us to an record low current whitetail density estimate.
 
Nice that you had meet/know John. My degree was in wildlife management and i would love to meet him some day. Planting: I planted 29000 trees on an 80 i bought. Mixed em up a bunch to keep the deer off the lines. With your lower deer populations the seedlings will have a better chance to get going with out being tipped. Moisture is the key for seedlings, shade not a big deal. I planted some in in 4 foot high grass, didnt think they survived but years later they started to emerge. It is moist were we planted. Heard management is a tough issue, politics interferes with proper harvest management etc. CWD was grossly mismanaged here in wisconsin. Game fame stock is not adequately monitored and the result is bad. As John said in his book, northern boreal forest was not the best for deer before the logging started. Hopefully some cedar stands will be preserved! take care
 
Frank PVC tube enclosed seedlings actually "develop" their own micro-climate within the tube. Condensation accumulates on the inside surface enchancing soil moisture, dessication is likely reduced in all but the most severe ambient high temperature conditions, the tube absorbs radiant solar energy that consequently raises internal temperature...

The limiting factor for the UP whitetail herd has always been WDC quality and scope on the landscape. I was attending a Whitetail Citizens Advisory Council meeting two years ago. I rant into the retired Region I Wildlife Division supervisor, who was a council member. He had helped me on several occasions when he was field biologist on ruffed grouse habitat issues and whitetail hunting I asked him whether he was staying, as well as should I apply for the open seat to counter the "kids" who only wanted to bicker about antler point restrictions. He said he was leaving when his term expired in two months. We discussed habitat issues as well WDC habitat development in subsequent conversations. Jim worked as a Safari Club International wildlife consultant. Through his contacts in SCI he gained the "ear" of two Natural Resources Commission members. They are fully supportive of his efforts via the UPHWG, his former employer is not (Not their idea, so they now have suffer the embarrassment of doing nothing for so long.)... quite sad to have to fight with your fish and game management agency hierarchy to achieve a beneficial outcome. He had several "collisions" with his Wildlife Division Chief on the same issue when he was still Region I Wildlife

Bob Doepker, MDNR Field biologist, authored an internal report that attempted to estimate whitetail deer density through time for the U.P. herd. The most interesting point born out of the data was that whitetail deer density peaked coincidentally with the peak paper pulp industry conducted clear-cutting effort, declining in the interval since the paper pulp industry reached over capacity and declined. Both the Phase I and Phase II predator-prey MSU study data in the low and moderate snowfall tiers indicate that high stem count fawning sites provide best predator avoidance protection, particularly when horizontal obstructions are high (hinge cutting for QDM proponents) via blow downs.

Prions are an interesting "beastie". An infectious disease specialist I occasionally hunt grouse with holds the perspective that prion spread from the Mt. Horeb area is facilitated by off-road ATV and 4WD vehicle users transporting prions to other sites in Wisconsin. He, as well as the State Fish Hatchery manager who was with us on the grouse hunt where this was the discussion topic, advocate prescribed burns in CWD foci to lower prion concentrations in the forest duff. Their discussion made me really focus when I drove through that area a few weeks back when I drove out through Wisconsin and Iowa to pick-up a dog. The degree of agricultural activity also likely helped keep prions available in quantity in the surface soil layer.
 
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