Glues have come a long way since horsehide and wheat paste. A friend of mine worked helicopter maintenance in Vietnam and told me the skins on the rotary wings were glued on with a special Boeing adhesive. Ever since then, I've considered that the right glue for a job is not to be dismissed out of hand.
Yep. The right glue, and the correct
preparation for that glue.
I have no problem using all kinds of adhesives for jobs on firearms. But it needs to be the correct adhesive, and the parts must be prepared well. Failure to prep is a waste of time.
I worked
MH-53s. Our rotor blades (2nd/
3rd Gen) had a pressurized titanium spar running the length of the blade, with laminated honeycomb and a few aluminum and/or titanium strips to reinforce special areas or to allow for slight bending to trim the blade to fly with the rest.
Everything in the airfoil was attached with adhesives - some ultra-high-tech, some conspicuously low-tech. Some had to be heated within pressure vessels to achieve the correct specific gravity, before being being applied at exactly 63 degrees F, within 8 seconds of the primer being sprayed on; and then cured under pressure at a specific temperature for umpteen hours before a dozen more exacting steps were followed. Others (rubber cement, anyone?
) just needed to be applied to surfaces that had been degreased and well-dried.
It's amazing how long we were able to run those blades between time-changes (over 1,000 hours), given how dynamic a rotor blade is in flight.
But it was also amazing just how quickly a blade would fail if not prepared correctly for a repair (also always using some form of adhesive, of course). A bad repair generally failed within 5-10 minutes during the first check-flight, or during the ground-run before the bird even got off the ground.
My experience has been the same with firearms. If it's going to fail, you'll know sooner than later.