Adhesives – week 1

It’s been a cold and wet week and we had one failure.

Crack sealer 1

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‘Clamped’ Gorilla Glue

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Gorilla Glue

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Epoxy

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Crack Sealer 2 (same sealer – I just put two tiles down with it)

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The crack sealer tiles were not applied using the method outlined in the Toynbee how-to. I need to find some scrap tar paper and try it the right way – I do think the paper will make a difference.

Adhesives

The standard way of applying Toynbee tiles to road surfaces is with asphalt crack sealer (see here for a how-to). Chris reported some issues on his first go-round with QRCode tiles and crack sealer; it’s not apparent whether it was the brand of sealer or whether the full coverage (no gaps/cutouts for letters) of the QRCode caused a problem with slipping and moving. Sounds like it’s time for a little empiricism! Off to the big box store for a selection of adhesives and a chipped VCT tile (extra cheap!).

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To be tested: Gorilla Glue, Epoxy and Crack Filler. I tossed a bucket of water on the road surface before sticking down two tiles with Gorilla Glue – I parked a front wheel of my truck on one tile to clamp it and left the other one unclamped to see what it would do.

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Epoxy and crack sealer were both applied with zero prep – epoxy on the tile first, crack sealer squirted on the road and the tile plopped into it. Notice the clever labeling.

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At the end of day one, all tiles are still in place – let’s see what the week will bring.

QRCodes

Essential to this whole mediated toynbee thing is a starting point – a machine-readable symbol that takes you to mtoynbee.com. In three sizes (for no good reason), I give you your mtoynbee.com QR Codes:

mtoynbeecom_sm

mtoynbeecom_md

mtoynbeecom_lg

You can right-click on any of the images above and do a save image as, or you can click here for a zip file containing everything.

You can put the codes on stickers, have them tattooed anywhere on your body, etc. but in my mind the canonical use is to cut out linoleum tile matrices and embed them in road surfaces.