HOW TO FIX broken plastic ULTIMATE Welding Forming Repair techniques

not good today we're looking at plastic welding how to fix this so it's stronger than it was originally how to free form plastic parts to make parts that weren't even there all with simple hand tools garage tools you should have you want to find out keep watching so here we got a typical break where the piece of plastic just snapped right off we just gotta stick it back on you could try stuff like super glue and you'll find out really quickly that super glue does not work good on plastic so it's a quick and easy repair we need one tool you basically need one tool this entire job and that is a soldering iron that's it yep for electrical work solder work you need a soldering iron you can use one of these inexpensive pencil style um just make sure it has a wide tip but you can pick these up on amazon i'll put a link below for 10 bucks or something sometimes less somewhere around there and they work just as good i like something like this because i can has a trigger i can turn on and off and regulate the temperature and so if it gets too hot i'm not burning the plastic i can kind of regulate it a little bit better but the basics behind um welding plastic is as simple as it sounds we just stick it there we take the soldering iron we heat it up and we just melt the plastic together i'll show you a couple techniques to it but there's a little bit more to it if we actually want that repair to be stronger than original and i'll show you that as well so with most plastic parts you have a pretty side and an ugly side a side that won't get seen so i'm going to go from the ugly side first i'm just going to put it where i want it where it goes and i'm going to we'll call it essentially attack weld where i'm just going to come in here and just melt the pieces right on the seam back together give it a second come along do attack weld okay that's tack welded now the basics behind it is we need to melt both sides of plastic and mix them together so what i will do is go through the crack we'll just start here in the middle and i want to go 90 the the trick is you want to go 90 of the way through and then i'm just going to fold it and fold it both the bulges of plastic that popped up on both sides come down the crack fold fold fold fold i'm just mixing plastic from both sides going down into my crack mix now one thing you want to remember you want to go as deep into this split into your damage as possible without you know especially if you have a cosmetic side on this side without going all the way through now if you don't have a cosmetic side on this side and this side doesn't matter what you're going to do is go 75 of the way through and then come on this side and go 75 of the way through and and mix it in and this is the basics behind plastic welding so for a cosmetic purpose this is that repair is done this is probably 75 percent as strong as original mainly just because i didn't come through on the other side but it'll it would hold up i could put this in and just use it but we want to make that even stronger so it doesn't crack again in that vulnerable area so there's a few things we can do to do that so just like in welding a filler rod is going to help us take that repair and build it up and make it stronger we have plenty of room on the inside we can build it up make it a way stronger repair and what we want to use that we want to fill a rod they sell plastic filler rod but there's really no point when you can get a lifetime supply in something like this cutting up one you know free 5 gallon bucket this is plastic that is called hdpe hcp is my preferred plastic that i use to do all plastic repairs it comes in a million different colors it's readily available it doesn't smell bad when it melts kind of smells like candle wax when it melts you know some plastics like pvc stuff like that you don't want to use those to smell atrocious and they don't work that good but you can get hcpe in things like milk jugs you know this is paper thin i use that all the time this is the dryer the fin inside your tumble dryer that's that that works fantastic and you can get it in a bunch of different you know contours shapes cut out to what you want but this is what i'm going to use for filler rod you can also use things like um zip ties it's nylon i find this be this a lot of people use this is very brittle when you heat it up and get it this doesn't have much strength to it you know once you heat it up and melt it into the other plastic i find this to be brittle so i don't use that very much but a lot of people use that i have used it it's okay it's just not as good as hdpe plastic so it wants a filler rod easy enough hdp plastic cuts fantastic with all woodworking tools you know i'll throw a jigsaw or anything else here we just have some side cutters and i can just essentially just cut myself off a piece of filler rod and that's it and so i can take this and now melt this over the top of my repair but there's one more step that will make this virtually indestructible and stronger than original and that is this window screen this is metal window screen mesh if you lay this into the plastic it is way stronger than it originally was so this right here is a fiberglass window screen down here this does work it's just not what you want this right here is just typical metal um window screen and you get one from a window and it'll last you a lifetime but we'll just cut out a piece it actually cuts just with scissors it's that easy but it's all stainless steel wire mesh and essentially what it does is it bonds in there and with the the wires going different ways it makes it impossible virtually impossible for you to rip it apart so what i do is i just need a repair piece about the size of my repair we'll start in this crack right here the nice thing about the metal is this is going to carry heat and we can just kind of touch it and what it'll do is just start sinking there it started sinking and so you just push on top of the metal mesh and it'll just sink right into your repair i'll just go along it's going off a little bit it's just going off the crack and then we can bend it back over and then we can just follow the center of my crack no jokes there's a lot of crack jokes in this video there you go that will not crack on that same joint that is strong now if i want to now if i'm really concerned about it if it's really structural that's when i'd come back in with my filler rod and especially like in this inside joint right here this is a good spot for it i will just take the chunk of filler rod that i made and i'll just start mixing and blending that in now you have to when you're using the filler rod you can't just melt it to the surface see if i just melt it it will just come right off you've got to melt below it too so you gotta mix i kind of like using different color filler rod just because you can see where you've mixed it in and so i'm mixing the two colors and these are two different types of plastic too um i believe actually don't even know what the the the brown plastic is i know that the the gray is hdpe but i have no idea what the brown brown is but that joint right there where it's probably where the crack started right at a seam is stronger than original i've reinforced it with some with a gusset essentially but i can come out across here in various different areas if i just especially right down at the bottom down here and i could just apply essentially a gusset right across the bottom as well so for the most part you can't tell that cracks there once i paint it you wouldn't be able to tell i could push some primer or something into that hole but that repair right there is stronger than original i've put a gusset here in here where the crack would start i mean i can i can flex it i mean it will the plastic this plastic is so thin and brittle i'm going to break it somewhere else but the repair is stronger than original and that's what you want when you weld something and the trick is is mainly this this um screen material this mesh but what about if you don't have the screen material because not everybody just has old screen material laying around i have done hundreds of repairs with copper wire so this is just a chunk of copper wire you pull out a strand this is actually pretty thick stuff but it doesn't really matter so just cut off a chunk pull out a strand and the same area that i did down here what i'm going to want to do is generally i will zigzag it so that these zigzags bite into each side so we have a crack right here that's starting so i will show you that we just take these zigzags essentially which is pretty basic we'll just put it right over our crack and what is going to happen is the zigzag the loops are gonna keep it from pulling apart and same thing i'm just gonna lay it right over the crack that's starting and the metal the nice thing about the copper or the stainless steel of the screen material is it heats up further down and it just pushes right in this right here this just pushing this this metal in this makes it just this is just what you want to do on every single plastic repair it's the difference between it cracking again and never cracking again it will crack somewhere else so the way i made this piece right here was it's actually two different pieces i'll show you a picture but essentially it was just a flat piece this face was just a flat piece just like you would do in sheet metal and it was kind of bent like that and then i just got a piece for the top that was bent like that and then i just plastic welded this seam in together hdpe welds together beautifully without i don't even have any reinforcement on itself i only have reinforcement between the brown and the gray plastic but let's build up this piece that is missing right here pretty simple i took a piece i kind of had a contour to it and i just roughed scratch it out with the all shape that i need it and you can cut this out with jigsaw everything else it cuts actually pretty dang nice with just a pair of pin snips aviation snips okay got that piece all in um it protrudes a little bit and that's fine because this stuff is plastic it cuts pretty easily it actually sands pretty easy so you can actually sand it with a really coarse um sandpaper it does work good things like just a metal abrasive cutoff disc work really good they start kind of melting it the thing that works the and i've used that a ton grinding discs but the best thing i found is like blades and so like like a jigsaw or something works better take a handsaw you know i could just hand saw that out real fast here we just have a rotary carbide blade for metal but that works amazingly well in the plastic and doesn't create a ton of heat where it just kind of remelts it now i like having multiple different chunks of plastic sitting around for different shapes because they have contours already built in but you can make your own contours extremely easy um this is just a flat piece you take your soldering iron you can just you know where you want it to bend just make a line go majority of the way through not all the way it'll bend for you and then you can just weld that seam right back up and you get nice sharp crisp bends or you can take the heat gun you know you take a heat gun and warm it up and it'll bend however you want you can take something like a blowtorch and it's fast and hdp is nice because it takes it doesn't just bend i mean it doesn't just melt instantly you know and then we can put it where we want it allow it to cool you know it gets to a plasticized state and when it cools it stays where it stays where you leave it so you can come up with some cool shapes just with heat and stuff like that blow torch heat gun soldering iron you see we're getting there so that's how you plastic weld that's how you make parts and that's how parts are stronger than original this will not break off with the mesh in there that piece will not break off ever again this piece right here this will not break off it'll break down further before it broke on this joint because i have the uh the mesh material all into that joint everywhere i have it reinforced with um essentially you know plastic welding rod homemade plastic welding rod this should not break that's kind of thin i might reinforce that just a little bit this down here reinforce that so that's how you plastic weld and that's how you plastic weld and make it last use those tips and you'll end up with a strong repair this will go back in the car i'll paint it brown but it'll go back in the car nobody will ever be the wiser it'll sit there for another 40 years until somebody else decides to take it off the steering column and break another part of it but thanks for watching guys have a good one bye can the sprinkler just do its thing how's it supposed to water the grass when you're up on it get it get it in there it's still going you almost got it i think it's gonna stop you

Channel: sixtyfiveford

Views: 1,497,137

Keywords: weld, fix, repair, replace, broken, toy, machine, nylon, plastic, hdpe, pvc, abs, diy, glue, super, baking soda, super glue, epoxy, 3d printer, print

Id: OVaup9CYOL0

Length: 16min 49sec (1009 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021