Originally Posted by
Camilo
Oh for F sakes! My head is spinning from the irrelevant knowledge we've all gained.
Just go on EBay and buy a bunch of the right kind of glue. You can get bunches of the little tubes like the ones that come in patch kits, or bulk containers as has been explained above. I prefer buying they little tubes in bulk to replenish the little saddle bag kits.
Just search for the name brand you are familiar with or get generics - which I've done and they work fine. You can buy bulk little patches too.
I'm sure you can do the same on Amazon but aside from not wanting to support that company and it's greedy head, eBay sellers have been much much better at fulfillment and shipping time for me.
The problem with your approach is that very few patches use the “right kind of glue”. The vast majority of them are simply contact cement which is rubber in a solvent. The contact bond can be relatively good but it isn’t permanent. The glue and patch are just held together by contact.
Rema uses chemistry to make new rubber. In that SDS above, “N-Ethylcyclohexylamine” is added as an accelerator used to make new bonds with chemicals contained in the patch. I can’t find what the chemical in the patch is but it is a sulphur compound that won’t start cross linking without the accelerator. If the patch actually uses “cold vulcanization”, the patch and fluid have to be matched so that the chemistry is right. Just grabbing a patch that
looks like Rema patches doesn’t mean that it will
act like a Rema patch.
And, if you don’t think that cold vulcanization is a thing or that the chemistry doesn’t matter, long conveyor belts are repaired with cold vulcanization...as the preferred method.. That’s a whole lot more demanding job then a bicycle patch.
Finally, I’ve seen the results of “just going with the cheapest patch” at my local co-op. We used to use Rema fluid in cans and Rema patches in bulk. Someone made the decision to go with cheap Clark patches. Failures went from 1 in 10 (mostly due to user error) to 2 in 5. It actually cost us
more because of all the failures.