I’m making a piece of art and I need to glue the wheels of a bunch of Matchbox and other toy cars onto a piece of wood. Then, when I upend it to hang, the little cars will stay there despite, you know, gravity.
Is there a good glue in a tube or whatever that would work?
Would it be better to use a glue gun (and why)? Are there good and bad glue guns?
Thanks for any help!
Dots of well-mixed epoxy. I’d probably use one especially suited to plastics, as I know those will bond reasonably well to wood and I am not sure how well other formulations will bond to that hard ABS(?) used for toy car wheels.
Hot glue probably will not work well - if you keep the dots small enough to be unobtrusive, they’ll have no mechanical grip to back up the adhesion, and likely pop loose with time, temp change and jostling. (I hate hot glue in general, especially for anything except soft craft use.)
you might also make a slight circular recess (like a millimeter) which will give more gluing surface for each wheel.
How long do you need it to last? You could use a couple of layers of double sided foam tape if you don’t need a long term bond. That should be plenty strong enough to hold toy cars upside down, you’re bonding the chassis to the wood, not the wheels, more surface area to work with.
It really does depend on how long the project is expected to last and how much moving around or vibration or jostling it will have to take.
I’d probably use a stack of two or three washers, maybe 3/8 diameter, and some good metal-friendly epoxy to glue them to the board and the center of the underside of the car. Unless it would be visible from some angle and thus ruin the effect, that could be made nearly indestructible.
But drilling a small hole in each wheel to give a stronger mechanical bond with a drop of epoxy would work well, too.
Epoxy will work, but I’d personally go for a good blob of clear silicone underneath the body of each car (not actually gluing the wheels at all)
I second epoxy.
One-second epoxy? Man, even superglue doesn’t bond that fast. How in t’hell do you mix it and use it in a single second?
Oh. Never mind. 
Silicone would be another good choice but I’m not sure about how durable the bond would be.
Goop!
As has been noted, I don’t think this is a great choice here. (I’d probably go with silicone RTV.)
But one tip with hot-melt gluing is to get the surfaces reasonably hot (perhaps with a heat gun) before you apply the glue. That way, adhesion tends to be much better.
Hot glue might melt the wheels. Epoxy may work, but silicone adhesive will probably work best, and the cars can be removed when you are done. If the wheels are made of polyethylene epoxy may not bond to them, so unless you use big globs of it the cars may come off some day. As Mangetout suggests, use a blob of silicone to attach the body to the board.
Another alternative is to drill holes in the board and wire the cars down. There should be space to run the wires over the wheel ‘axles’.
Personally i’d go mechanical and chemical pins either red hot melted into the wheels or drilled and epoxied, then the pins glued into the board, just feels more secure than just glue.
You could try a Permatex product that is a 2 part epoxy meant for plastic and smells like a cat pissed on your face or you could try a tube of Black RTV, which will glue anything to anything.
Or file each tire a little flat.
This ↑↑↑ The bottoms of real car tires are a bit flat… 
Hot glue. Works great, fairly easy to remove if that need ever comes.
Wow, lots of good information here. I have to sort through it. When I’m done and all the little cars are glued down, I’ll post a picture!
Thanks for all your help. This is always the place to come. 
Lately I’ve become a fan of gorilla glue for it’s use on dissimilar materials. Less fuss and muss than mixing epoxy.
It’s drawback is slower drying time and it expands as it dries. A razor knife trims any blobs away easy enough.
+1
This is the way to do it.
Well… there are over 100 cars…