How To Bond and Weld 3D Printed PLA Parts - No chemicals or Glue

[Music] hey guys what's up welcome my channel today it could be a kind of a little quick video I've been getting a lot of questions asking me how long bonding infusing PLA together what I'm doing to glue and secure and melt and weld so I'm just going to show you the techniques that I've been using this isn't the end-all be-all there are dozens you know dozens of different ways to do this and do your research figure out what works best for you I found out that this works best for me I've done a couple little stress tests and we're to show you what tools I've been using how I've been doing it and we'll jump right in so I have a helmet here I've been meaning to fuse together this is gonna be going on the suit itself right now I have it all taped together I was doing some trimming and after priming and filling the stir still some touch-up needed on this but this is what we're gonna be fusing today obviously there's nothing to do on the faceplate so we can kind of get rid of that so we're gonna be fusing this jaw or this is all taped together we're gonna be fusing in here and gluing this making this all one permanent piece and I'll be showing you how I'm going to be doing that so you can super glue it together you can use a two-part cyanoacrylate this stuff works great it's a pretty basic normal super glue with an activator pen it will either usually be kind of a liquid or a spray and it catalyzes it and it makes it super strong and super hard which is good I've seen people use epoxies I've seen people use a couple different things what I've been using is a three dollar soldering iron and actually melting the parts together now what this does this doesn't actually fully melt the plastic like burn it like a lighter or firewood but this actually melted down to basically what it was when I came out of the nozzle in the extruder and you can actually use the soldering iron to kind of fold and melt the plastic back together so I'm gonna be showing you how I did do that and let's get this jaw piece off alright now that this is a part what you're gonna want to do is make sure your pieces fit together good take your time stand them down I already kind of trimmed all this up and got them looking pretty nice I think right before you are actually about to glue them or fuse them what I would do is just scuff up the edges a little bit knock on any paint or primer that might be you know kind of congested up in there think about if you're going to be able to access the other parts while you're doing this just scuff them up real nice the biggest thing I want to say though is do this in a nice ventilated area and wear a mask right before I start on actually melting there will be some fused so I'm gonna throw a little respirator mask on you should still be able to hear me just fine but do this in a ventilated area if you have pets or animals or especially kids just do it somewhere safe be smart about it you are melting plastic there will be smoke don't inhale it please so just be smart about it so this is all cleaned up I know this part fits which is good all right now you can do a couple things here what I used to do is actually glue the parts together just dab it and dot it make sure it was lined up real nice but what I've been doing lately is to say mom I don't know if you have melted superglue it's really not good for you so what I've been doing is taking some duct tape and throwing it on the outside so get it kind of lined up where you want it all right so we'll put it there and I'm gonna wrap this around the edge and hold this part there so I have a very high very good access to this whole seam line in here so eat up your soldering iron now like I said this is a super cheap unregulated plug directly into the wall soldering iron this isn't some regulated expensive DC very vintage want like this is super cheap because these things usually what I've noticed getting much hotter than the other ones and they're cheap they're throw away so I don't solder with this anymore it's just for literally just this it's very hot so first thing I'll do is I'll start making kind of like X pattern indents in the in the plastic itself so I'll pull it down kind of like that and let the soldering iron cut through if you start pushing you could kind of warp and move the piece and then you'll see that it makes like little wall edges as a Gault's it'll kind of make a little wave and what I'll do is I'll actually fold that back in and that's pretty much the whole technique just apply it over a long long area however deep you want to go it will that's what will that help determine how strong it is so pay attention to how think the plastic is how deep you're going in you could very easily punch through and definitely don't want that or maybe you do it depending on the piece you're fusing maybe you don't care what the other side looks like in this case I do care very much so without hitting the tape you get a better handle on this let's see right here I currently don't have any flat open parts that I could really show you guys I should have printed them for this but since this was what I needed to do I figured this would be the best video to do so push on and just make kind of an X cross right along it and it'll melt the plastic to the other and you can already see some of the smoke coming up so just please avoid that don't breathe this stuff in if you did use superglue when you hit those pockets of dried superglue they will vaporize and do not get that don't breathe that in don't um don't let it get in your eyes it is bad I've done it so however much time you take on this you can actually start to see that I'm smoothing out the plastic and the seam is pretty much gone if you've ever weld that you know about like you know seen penetration and all that and how deep you can actually make the well this is pretty much the same concept however much time you take getting in there is how your results will be so I'm gonna go through and seal this entire thing do this whole edge on both sides and then we'll jump to that and I'll show you what that looks like once I take the tape off alright so that's all done I went up the entire edge let's try to move some stuff around real quick so you can see this got a cool new stabilizing mouth nitro Pro so it's kind of nice I went all the way up the edge and I kind of did the whole seam that wraps around now you can spend hours if you want kind of smoothing this out this is just quick for the sake of toriel I probably even go back and touch some of this out what you can also do with the soldering iron though is actually clean up under extrusion and clean up where your supports and rafts probably were so this is where the jaw piece was kind of sitting on the bed and while some of the filler primers already started to touch into it if you actually run the soldering iron kind of over it I think the lights kind of washing that out a little bit you can actually kind of smooth down some of these parts that might look like junk and you can also clean up like really sharp edges by being careful with it and moving it around so this is kind of use this for just getting rid of some of the sharp edges now say you have a spot that some some prints are hollow right so when you start to melt through the plastic what can happen is you can actually kind of blow through a wall and there might not be enough plastic there to even fuse you can actually use this like a stick welding or like a 3d pen if you don't have a 3d pen and where you can take just a little scrap piece or just a piece off your off your spool and you can actually just kind of lay it in the seam and add extra material by just pressing down on it and letting it melt into the part and I've used this to fill little holes that I didn't want to have to put bondo or filler or wood filler in and you just kind of melt it until you think you have enough pull the part out and then you have a little mountain of plastic that you can now just kind of move around and melt and fuse into the part and smooth it out especially if you want to kind of clean it all up and make it as flush and flat as possible so let's take this tape off and see how it all looks it's kind of a trick kind of a load question I already know that it's gotta look out those many times before so I can bend and flex this all I want and it prominent it should break in other spots before it breaks there and like I said however deep you want to go and push through you got to be real careful like the seams and stuff just take your time practice with it this technique works great for me it's been wonderful cuz now I can sand and just do whatever I want with that seam a dremel or a little piece of sandpaper will kind of knock down and you can just I left raised and this is all one solid piece you could very well maybe on a big flat part I can't really do it here because there's such this nice seam line however on a piece like this a kind of a back piece or large flat piece that I've actually already worked on I did the technique I kind of stitched it I need to go back and clean this up I didn't fold this as nice as I wanted to but I did the same thing on the front I actually went over and well then melted the front as well and then sanded it down I used a model or scribing tool to open the lines back up and what that does is it just pulls plastic out so I use that to kind of touch up the lines again you can actually use the soldering iron to kind of if you have a hot knife or a soldering iron you can actually pull those lines open again by melting it and with the sander I was able to knock down you know the ugly looking plastic that was sitting on the outside and that's totally fine if you don't have a lot of lines you need to worry about melt both sides get you know complete thorough penetration through the whole plastic and the sanded down I still need to go in and fill a little bit of this up because obviously there are pockets left from when I melted but it works great I've done it on the whole suit and I haven't had any parts that I've welded like that break I've had parts I've super glued break off but this has been working great so I hope this helps it somebody on fusing their projects and their PLA if you have any suggestions or tips or you want to call me an idiot for doing this that's fine just leave a comment and I think that's it if you have like I said Italian questions about any other let me know I'm still have a couple other videos I want to make the tutorials just what I've been doing in the process and that's it have a good day [Music]

Channel: Frankly Built

Views: 8,173

Rating: 4.9761195 out of 5

Keywords: pla, welding, glue, fusing, plawelding, howtocombine3dprints, howtoglue3dprints, plafusing, plasticwelding, plasticfusing, combine3dprints, howtocombineprints, 3dprinted, 3dprints, strong

Id: QpCaAAxZfM4

Length: 10min 36sec (636 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 16 2020