A couple decades ago I was, for a brief time, a (not very good) hardware design engineer. In the lab, we used cyanoacrylate to glue parts to boards, and we used spray bottles of activator to harden the stuff. And so I learned that Krazy glue and related products, which normally only stick well to fingers, can be made to stick where and when you want them to, if you just use a spritz of activator on it.
After that little epiphany, I purchased cyanoacrylate at the local Radio Shack a number of times, and always got hardener with it. Later I purchased some at a hardware store, and again got the hardener with it. The stuff was great; it would stick, no questions asked, to just about anything -- as long as one used the activator. Then a few years went by during which I didn't buy the stuff -- didn't do any projects which needed it, hadn't used up the old stock. And one day I went to the local hardware store and looked for cyanoacrylate with hardener. No luck -- none on the shelves. I asked a clerk; he'd *never* *heard* of hardener for cyanoacrylate! (Of course that just means they hadn't carried it any time in the last couple months, but none the less it was a bit startling.) Later I checked Radio Shack. Same deal -- no hardener, clerks had never heard of the stuff. Hardener is for epoxy, that's all they knew about. I've looked in other stores since; it's always the same. They don't carry it and as far as they know, there is no such thing, and never was. Somebody seems to have erased cyanoacrylate activator from the page of time. Anybody here know what happened? Why'd it get pulled from the market? Does the stuff turn out to make your head swell up and turn purple or something? Or can you get high off of it? (Or have I just been unlucky in 5 out of 5 stores I've tried, and the stuff really is still on the shelves *somewhere*?)
