Over 30 years ago, my best friend at the time used Contact with that needle applicator for his models, and despite not smoking, always kept a cigarette lighter handy to unblock it
As for what I use to glue with, maybe a little under 30 years ago, someone tipped me to buy 250 ml tins of a thinner/degreaser commonly sold in hardware stores here in the Netherlands, as that works very well to glue model kit parts. Pour it into an empty bottle with brush, that liquid model cements normally come in, and you can just keep refilling the bottle any time you need it. The tins cost (back then and now) about as much as a 40 ml bottle of model cement.
I used that for decades and am very happy with it. Maybe two years ago, I decided to buy a bottle of
Tamiya Extra Thin, and found it works better for some things and not as well for others, so now I have two bottles of glue. Mainly, the TET doesn’t evaporate as fast, so it’s better for glueing small parts together where I need to put a dot of glue on one side and then press the other part to it. When the TET ran out, I found out what it’s actually made of, and decided to buy 100 ml bottles of the two ingredients, mixing them 50/50 when needed. Again, because I’m cheap in this regard: those two bottles including postage set me back about as much as a bottle of TET with postage but hold about five times as much
