Poxipol

Poxipol is sold in a flat cardboard box printed in navy blue and yellow, with a great white X behind the name. Inside are two tubes, one of resin and one of hardener. Equal lengths are squeezed out, mixed into a grey paste and pressed into the break, where it sets hard enough, the maker says, to bear a thousand kilos, and can then be drilled, filed or sawn.

The adhesive was the first product of Akapol, a firm founded in 1960, according to its own history, by the brothers Claus and Reiner Kühlcke and their father, Dr Adolf Kühlcke, at the back of their house in Villa Ballester, on the north-western edge of Buenos Aires. Two-part epoxies were already in industrial use; the Kühlckes' idea was to adapt one so that anyone could use it for repairs at home.

Advertising made the name. Testimonios BA recalls the black-and-white television spots of the early 1960s in which, amid shoot-outs, fires and collapsing buildings, an unruffled 'Míster Poxipol' held out his little box while a chorus sang that it could all be fixed. A press advertisement of 1963 showed workmen on scaffolding around the statue of the Redeemer, more than five metres tall, on the Basílica del Sagrado Corazón in Buenos Aires, cracked and mended with Poxipol rather than taken down and recast.

The brand grew a family around it, from Poxilina putty to La Gotita, and the name itself passed into the language as a word for any strong glue. The product has been adjusted rather than replaced: today there are grey and transparent versions that harden in ten minutes and a slower-setting grey, in boxes from fourteen millilitres to seven hundred. All are still two parts mixed one to one, made in Argentina by the company that launched it.