Well, kind of. The original stuff was just a castable plastic that turned out to be a really nice glue. There are formulations that were specifically for skin bonding, however.
What you can generally purchase as “superglue” (usually 100% ethyl or a blend of ethyl/methyl cyanoacrylate) is not the same thing as liquid stitches (Butyl or Octal cyanoacrylate), and only barely bonds to human skin (you can peel your fingers apart if you superglue them together, for example). The real medical-grade stuff is intense and fairly dangerous, as it can’t be peeled off like people are used to and trying to remove it usually results in ripping patches off the skin.
You can sometimes get the real stuff (Dermabond is the most commonly available brand name) but it’s so incredibly frequently counterfeited that buying from a reputable reseller is pretty critical if you don’t want to put dirty unsanitized ethyl cyanoacrylate directly into an open wound. I’ve never found the real stuff on, for example, amazon.
It’s a remarkable material. one of my favorites. Gonna go watch videos about it on youtube right now, now that I think of it. it’s been a while, there might be some new ones.
I feel like it would make a good 3d printer material for certain applications, and there are formulations that are highly recyclable. I would love to be able to print prototypes without wasting tons of plastic. But I need to learn a lot more about materials science and a little more about robotics before I can really reason about how a working cyanoacrylate printer would behave. It would be a fun project to try if I had tons of money.
When I was a kid I discovered that cyanoacrylate acts upon human skin. It also acts upon all the change in my parents’ giant change jar.
Cyanoacrylate was formulated specifically to bond well with human skin. Liquid stitches.
Well, kind of. The original stuff was just a castable plastic that turned out to be a really nice glue. There are formulations that were specifically for skin bonding, however.
What you can generally purchase as “superglue” (usually 100% ethyl or a blend of ethyl/methyl cyanoacrylate) is not the same thing as liquid stitches (Butyl or Octal cyanoacrylate), and only barely bonds to human skin (you can peel your fingers apart if you superglue them together, for example). The real medical-grade stuff is intense and fairly dangerous, as it can’t be peeled off like people are used to and trying to remove it usually results in ripping patches off the skin.
You can sometimes get the real stuff (Dermabond is the most commonly available brand name) but it’s so incredibly frequently counterfeited that buying from a reputable reseller is pretty critical if you don’t want to put dirty unsanitized ethyl cyanoacrylate directly into an open wound. I’ve never found the real stuff on, for example, amazon.
It’s a remarkable material. one of my favorites. Gonna go watch videos about it on youtube right now, now that I think of it. it’s been a while, there might be some new ones.
I feel like it would make a good 3d printer material for certain applications, and there are formulations that are highly recyclable. I would love to be able to print prototypes without wasting tons of plastic. But I need to learn a lot more about materials science and a little more about robotics before I can really reason about how a working cyanoacrylate printer would behave. It would be a fun project to try if I had tons of money.