The leatherette on my Bronica S2A has been peeling away at the corners for a while. I am going to re-skin the whole camera at some point and the question of what glue to use for that job has been bothering me for months. Ask on a forum and you will get five answers. Ask on a Facebook group and you will get fifteen. Almost everyone has a strong opinion and almost nobody seems to agree.
So I bought eleven different adhesives and a sheet of aluminium and ran a test. This article is the writeup. What I tested, how I tested it, what worked and what to avoid. The headline conclusion is that the winner is not a glue at all.
What a leatherette adhesive actually has to do
This is a less obvious job than it sounds. The adhesive you stick down camera leatherette with is doing a specific piece of work and most glues are not designed for it.
It has to bond the leatherette flat to a non-porous metal body without bubbling or peeling at the corners, and hold that bond for years through changes in temperature and humidity. The bond also has to allow you a few seconds of slide time when you first lay the leatherette down, because you need to be able to align the edges properly before it grabs.
Then comes the awkward bit. The adhesive also has to be removable. Almost every camera body has screws hidden underneath the leatherette, and you will need to remove the leatherette again at some point to dismantle the camera. A bond that is too strong will rip the leatherette when you try to take it off, which means you have just destroyed the covering and probably need to buy a new sheet. The ideal adhesive holds the leatherette firmly until you decide to remove it, then comes apart cleanly leaving neither residue on the metal nor torn fragments stuck to the underside of the leatherette.
That is a difficult specification. It rules out everything that bonds permanently. It rules out everything that is too weak to hold for years. The right answer is somewhere in the middle, and the manufacturers historically used a contact adhesive called Pliobond that hits that middle ground precisely. Pliobond is reasonably easy to find in the United States and is essentially impossible to find in the UK, which is the problem most British camera repairers run into. The next best option is a different contact adhesive that behaves similarly, and the question is which one.
What I tested
Eleven options went on the bench. Nine of them are adhesives and two are double-sided tapes.
The adhesives were Gorilla Glue clear contact adhesive (tested twice, once according to the manufacturer’s instructions and once applied straight to one surface), standard cyanoacrylate super glue, Elmer’s school PVA glue (a popular suggestion online), a stronger art-grade PVA, No Nonsense spray contact adhesive, Bostik contact adhesive applied to the manufacturer’s specification, E6000 Plus crystal clear and UHU flexible and transparent all-purpose. The double-sided tapes were a no-brand 3M-style double-sided sheet tape and Tesa double-sided tape.
For the test surface I used a strip of aluminium of the sort I cut lens boards from. The Bronica S2A body is chrome-plated stainless steel, not aluminium, but it is a similarly non-porous metal surface and the bond behaviour should be comparable. I cut twelve identical strips of the leatherette I am planning to use for the reskin and stuck one with each adhesive (plus the two methods for the Gorilla Glue).
I left them all to cure for about a week. The plan had been twenty-four hours but life got in the way and the wait turned into a longer one. Either way, all of the adhesives had reached their full strength by the time I came back to test them.
The test itself was simple. Pull each strip off the aluminium with pliers and assess two things. How strong was the bond and how cleanly did it release? A bond that is too weak is no use. A bond that comes off but takes half the leatherette with it is worse than no use. The winner is the one with the best balance.
How each one behaved
Gorilla Glue clear contact adhesive, applied per the instructions. A solid bond. The instructions call for applying glue to both surfaces and letting them go tacky before pressing together, which is the standard contact-adhesive method. The strip required moderate pliers force to remove and the leatherette came off clean. A respectable result. This would work as a leatherette glue.
Gorilla Glue clear contact adhesive, applied to one surface only. Slightly stronger bond than the instructions-following version, surprisingly. Also came off cleanly when pulled. The take-away here is that contact adhesive behaviour is forgiving. If you do not follow the instructions exactly you still get an acceptable result.
Super glue (cyanoacrylate). Do not use super glue. The bond was strong but the leatherette tore on removal, with fragments of the underside still glued to the aluminium and a corresponding patch of the leatherette stripped away. The cyanoacrylate appears to penetrate the leatherette backing and welds the two surfaces together at a molecular level. The result is that you cannot remove the leatherette without destroying it. This is the one truly bad result of the test.
Elmer’s school PVA. Comes up online as a recommendation but I cannot understand why. The bond was acceptable in the short term but the strip lifted with very little force. PVA is not designed for bonding leather to metal and it shows. If you are reskinning a camera with the expectation that the new leatherette will outlast you, PVA is not going to deliver.
Strong art-grade PVA. Better than I expected. The bond was strong and held against significant pull. This came off reasonably cleanly. Not the best result but a credible one and a decent backup if you cannot find anything else.
No Nonsense spray contact adhesive. Underwhelming. Took ages to stick down properly and the surface remained sticky for longer than I am comfortable with, and the eventual bond was not as strong as the brushed-on contact adhesives. The sprayed-on layer is also harder to control, with overspray going where you do not want it. I would not use this one again.
Bostik contact adhesive. Too strong. The bond was excellent but the leatherette tore on removal, with material left on the aluminium in patches. This is a contact adhesive that is doing its job slightly too well. Useful for permanent applications, not for camera leatherette where you need the option to remove it cleanly later.
E6000 Plus crystal clear. This one was genuinely impressive. A strong bond that held firmly against pull, but releasing cleanly when persuaded with moderate effort. The residue on the aluminium is gummy rather than fragmented and cleans up with a fingernail or some isopropyl alcohol. The leatherette comes off intact and could be re-stuck if needed. E6000 is the best of the actual glues in the test by a clear margin.
UHU flexible and transparent all-purpose. Similar pattern to the Bostik. Strong bond, but on removal the leatherette pattern was imprinted on the aluminium where the glue had bonded too aggressively to the underside of the covering. Material was transferred from the leatherette to the metal. Too aggressive a bond for camera work.
No-brand double-sided tape (3M style). A good result and a slightly surprising one. The bond was strong enough that I genuinely needed pliers, but the leatherette came off in one clean piece. The downside is that the adhesive stayed on the aluminium and is not coming off easily. Tape residue removal on a camera body is a chore.
Tesa double-sided tape. The winner. This is the one I will be using to reskin the S2A. The bond is strong and the application is clean and uniform, since you cut the tape to the shape you need before peeling the backing. On removal both sides came apart cleanly. The tape lifted off the aluminium with the leatherette in one piece. The leatherette is intact and could be re-stuck, and the metal has no residue to clean up. This is exactly the specification of the perfect leatherette adhesive and it turns out the answer is not a glue at all but a tape.
Why the tape wins
A few reasons stood out by the end of the test.
Application uniformity. Liquid adhesives go on in a layer that varies in thickness. Some areas end up thinner and weaker, others thicker and lumpier. Tape applies in a consistent layer of precisely the thickness of the tape itself, which is the same everywhere. The bond is uniform across the whole surface.
Pre-cutting. You can lay the tape onto the back of the leatherette before you cut the leatherette to shape, then cut both together. This is much easier than trying to apply glue to a pre-cut piece of material and align it on the camera body without smearing the edges.
Clean removal. Both surfaces come apart without residue, on both the leatherette side and the metal side. The tape stays with one or the other but does not split. This is the property that is hard to find in a glue.
The downside is that double-sided tape gives you no slide time. Once you press the leatherette down it is in position, and you have to get the alignment right first try. Glue adhesives that go tacky over several minutes are more forgiving on alignment. The trade-off for me is acceptable because the tape’s clean release is worth more than the slide time of the contact adhesives.
What I would actually recommend
The list of things I have learned from this test.
Use Tesa double-sided tape if you can. It hits the brief better than any of the glues I tested and is by some distance the easiest to apply.
If you prefer a glue, use E6000 Plus crystal clear. It was the strongest performer of the actual adhesives and releases cleanly enough to be usable for camera work. Gorilla Glue clear contact adhesive (either method of application) is a credible second.
Do not use super glue under any circumstances. The cyanoacrylate destroys the leatherette on removal and there is no going back.
PVA, spray contact, Bostik and UHU all had problems of one kind or another. None of them is catastrophic but none of them is the right tool for the job either.
A caveat before the comments
Everybody has a different opinion about this and the comments under the video reflect that fact. Camera repair technicians have favourite glues that have served them for decades. The two suggestions that come up most often that I did not test are Pliobond (imported from the United States by the bottle) and neoprene-based contact adhesives. I have also seen people swear by rubber cement and by shoe glue, neither of which I would have predicted. There are many right answers to this question and the one I have landed on (a tape, of all things) is unlikely to be the universal answer.
What I will say is that the test I ran was fair to the eleven things I tested. If your favourite is not on the list, that does not mean it does not work. It means I did not have any of it on the bench at the time.
The follow-up
The S2A reskin itself is the next stage. I have ordered the new leatherette and the Tesa tape, and the plan is to take the camera apart, peel the old covering off, clean the body with isopropyl alcohol and apply the new sheet using the technique that came out best from this test. The full reskin will get its own piece on the channel.
Thanks as always for reading. Drop a comment under the video if you have a favourite glue that I missed, or if you have used double-sided tape on a camera and have a view to share. I am genuinely curious about what has worked for other people.