Ryobi Dual Temperature Cordless Glue Gun review: no drips, no problem

Strapped for time? Here’s the Ryobi Dual Temperature Glue Gun Review in a nutshell: it’s a professional grade glue gun with several excellent features. But it’s more suited to larger DIY jobs than minor repairs.

Whether you’re repairing a balsa wood bi-plane for a grandkid or creating an artistic mirror out of driftwood, you’ll likely require one of the very best glue guns to assist with carefully sticking materials together.

These crafty tools heat up to searing temperatures and then feed glue sticks through a nozzle via a mechanism, which in turn melts the holt melt adhesive, making it more pliable and easier to spread exactly where you want it. Once the glue has set, you’re left with a bond that is about as unbreakable as Richard and Judy’s.

I’ve tested a fair few glue guns here and I have to say that this cordless number from Ryobi is one of the more professionally orientated I’ve had the pleasure of using. While you can pick something cheap and simple up from Amazon, they tend to be a lot worse than this. They tend to be flimsy, for a start, and you’ll need to plug it into the wall, which greatly reduces the versatility and ease of use. What’s more, cheap glue guns drip, creating a fair amount of mess, while the trigger and general action to get the glue moving typically aren’t the most precise.

You can probably guess that I'm about to say that Ryobi has remedied a lot of this in its RGL18-0 18V Glue gun… and you’re correct. Find out why by reading on. 

Ryobi Dual Temperature Glue Gun Review: price and availability

Ryobi has a RRP of £49.99 for the bare tool, which means it doesn’t come with a battery. Head to Amazon UK and you’ll find it for £45.48. In the States, you can get the tool, battery and charger for $149 on Amazon.com. 

The bare tool retails for $79.98 in Australia or $99 NZD. Both are available via Bunnings. 

Ryobi Dual Temperature Glue Gun Review: build quality

It is easy to mistake this glue gun for one of Ryobi’s drills and other handheld power tools and impact drivers. Its rubberised grip, plastic trigger and neon green paint job make it feel very familiar if you’re used to the One+ family of tools, all of which can be powered by the same battery.

Compared to cheaper rivals, it feels extremely solid, with enough ergonomic features to ensure it is easy to hold and use over extended periods of time. Opt for the more expensive 5.0Ah battery packs and this thing will last marathon glueing sessions without giving up the ghost.

That said, it is quite heavy once the battery is installed and certainly proves more unwieldy compared to cheaper corded rivals and tools like the Bosch GluePen, which is also battery powered but proves much smaller and easier to use when carrying out very precise glueing tasks.

The trigger on Ryobi’s Dual Temperature gun is nicely sprung, making it really easy to control the flow of glue, plus the company offers two interchangeable nozzles to further hone the flow for those trickier tasks. Pair this with the variable temperature switch and you have the ultimate control over your projects.

Cleverly, Ryobi also includes a drip tray that neatly flips from underneath the body when you need it, which shouldn’t be very often because I didn’t experience any excess glue when using the tool. It’s phenomenal how precise it is with its dispatch of the sticky stuff, so long as you have the correct nozzle and temperature setting for the task in hand. 

Ryobi Dual Temperature Glue Gun Review: performance

Glue guns aren’t the most complicated power tools you can buy but they are very useful and the amount of frustration you’ll experience when using one will vary dramatically depending on their build quality and performance.

As previously mentioned, cheaper glue guns tend to take an age to warm up, leave annoying trails of unused glue everywhere and feature triggers that seeming accelerate from zero to loads-of-glue with no settings in between.

Although the Ryobi gun is larger and heavier than some rivals, it makes up for its heft with some serious performance. Firstly, there are no annoying cords to contend with, you simply clip a Ryobi One+ battery pack into its bottom and away you go.

Heat up times are officially pegged at two minutes from cold to the hottest setting, but I found you could easily use it on the lower temperature setting much faster. Unlike other guns, the intense heat is also focussed on the metal nozzle, which is neatly covered by a protective rubber sheath in this case.

It means you can hold the glue gun with two hands for more precise application, while the accurate trigger makes it very easy to deliver exactly the right amount of glue. Ryboi includes glue five sticks in the pack, which are inserted into the back of the gun. It’s possible to line up two sticks once the first has been half used and the mechanism will automatically grab and feed them through the system when the trigger is squeezed. Nice.

On top of this, the variable temperature settings mean you can buy cheaper glue sticks from the t'interwebs, even though it isn’t recommended, and experiment with their melting temperatures. Try that with a single temperature gun and it’s likely you’ll have very thin, messy glue all over the place. Plus a load of useless sticks left over. 

Perhaps the biggest boon here is just how neat and tidy the Ryobi gun is, with very little - if nothing at all - in the way of excess glue drips.

Ryobi Dual Temperature Glue Gun Review: what customers say

From Amazon UK

• “The best hot glue gun I've owned. With a large capacity battery from my ryobi lawnmower, this glue gun would run for about 4 hours, plenty of time. The gun, once warmed up, will deliver glue in vast quantities without you having to wait for it to regain full temperature.”

• “We have a few kids and between us lots of hobbies and activities where a glue gun is a great addition. It has always been a regular used tool in our household. Moving to cordless just makes it so much easier to pull out and use anywhere, anytime. It heats up fast and as a bonus of the battery it stands up straight”.

• “No mention in the listing that the battery and charger must be purchased separately. Very misleading listing and I will be reporting it.”

Ryobi Dual Temperature Glue Gun Review: verdict 

A solid glue gun that gets up to temperature fast and does away with the cord for added versatility and ease of use. It is arguably not quite as precise as the smaller Bosch GluePen we tried, purely because it is so much bigger, but it’s superb for jobs that require larger, more constant applications.

We can see this easily slotting into a professional tool box and being used regularly on site, although it does require users to own other tools in the Ryobi One+ family, otherwise it feels very expensive for what it does.

Regardless, it feels better bolted together than offerings from the Bosch DIY range and packs a number of handy features that make glueing stuff together that bit more enjoyable and simpler.