Plastic Welding 101 [How to Plastic Weld]

[Music] this time when you break you fix it i teach you the core fundamentals of plastic welding let's get to it welcome back here at the fix shop is spring turkey season and i went to get all my all my gear out and i realized that my rod for my decoy was snapped and i thought it'd be a perfect opportunity to film a plastic welding 101 video i love plastic welding the more time goes on the more of our products and everything in our life is made out of plastic and what happens to plastic it breaks and this is a prime example of a 30 samad dollar turkey decoy that would have been virtually useless without this silly rod that's made to do all sorts of fancy stuff in the wind but because i have a plastic welding skill and a plastic welder this doesn't doesn't really matter so to you it's like okay i don't have a turkey decoy i don't care but i'll show you something that'll make you care what we've got over here is your standard headlight this is out of a truck most of your cars today probably all of your cars today are have plastic headlights so one of the biggest issues and coming from the collision industry is headlights break tabs very easily especially in cold climates you get a bunch of ice built up around the headlight you bump a fence or something like that in the wintertime and it snaps a tab off well for a 100 headlight you know it's 100 bucks that might be a lot of money you don't want to spend a hundred dollars i'm in the same boat i'm very cheap if you've been watching me for a while you know that and that's where the plastic welder comes in and so for instance to show you on this headlight tab it is split hopefully that'll focus it is split so we're going to do is we are going to repair that today so i also did a tool review on the pi on my plastic welder you don't need an expensive one to start out in fact i have never bought an expensive one i think this is 30 maybe 40 dollars it's just a heat source that's all it needs to be and be very careful these i mean i think you can see this you can't see it smoking so all we need today is the heat source and some stainless steel mesh and some tin snips to cut the mesh i forgot so what we want to do is we want to cut a piece stainless steel mesh that bridges our repair so let's say for instance if this whole tab was cracked off what you would want to do is cut a lot a fairly long strip wide strip of that stainless steel mesh to go along the back side of this and it's just i if you're familiar with concrete it's just like concrete rebar that metal rebar sinks down on the concrete to provide strength and that's exactly what this mesh is doing it's just going to be we're going to be mushing this and molding this into the plastic and that's where all our rigidity and strength is going to come from welding plastic to plastic isn't going to give you much strength aesthetically it's going to look nice but as soon as you put some stress on this it's going to snap that right off so we obviously don't want to do that so i'm going to go ahead and cut some mesh i think i'm going to change the camera angle too so you can see a lot better all right i got my camera angle adjusted so you can see this better so this is the tab right here that we're fixing that's that's split we're gonna make that so it's unsplit so now the so now let's see if i can get that we're gonna make this so it's unsplit so now we're gonna do is we're gonna hold our mesh up to the area that needs to be repaired so it's about ah that big you can cut it a little large because you can trim this with a grinder when you're done all right so you see we have our little piece of stainless steel mesh so an important thing i already did this i forgot to add it to the video i forgot to show you but you want to clean the plastic the contaminants in that are sitting on the plastic aren't going to help the plastic adhere to itself so you can see let's see let's get you closer so i'm just laying the mesh over the repair area and what we're trying to do is and what we're going to be doing is we're going to be just working that in to we're gonna be working this in with the heat so one thing we can do we're gonna be working this into the heat what i like to do is i like to just get the plastic start getting it warm see how i'm just barely dragging and tapping it and when you do your plastic repair you'll see the same thing also it's very important wear a respirator when you do this this the exhaust gases the gases emitted from heating up plastic are very toxic so i'm going to lay the mesh over i'm going to heat it with one side i'll get a close-up of this and you're going to want to wear gloves don't be foolish like me and you'll see that stainless slowly disappear into the plastic i'll get a closer shot of the next side now this is tacked all right let's get you a little closer see how one side is completely disappeared into the plastic and you'll see that when you do your repair that as soon as you touch that stainless with the heat source it'll smush that right down into the plastic and that's the exact goal you want to obtain it's just like concrete rebar we want to embed this into the plastic so i'm going to heat this side and see how i'm just barely pushing on that you just need enough heat to get that to smoosh into the plastic we don't have to go overkill so now if i was typically doing a larger crack what i would do is i would have an air hose and i would have a blow gun on an air compressor and i would be slowly tacking this across the mesh and just blow a little bit blow a little bit below a little bit because you're gonna see that this stuff has a mind of its own when you start heating all this as a entire repair the stainless steel mesh might want to curl up just because of the heat and pull out of the plastic so you're going to want to do a little bit at a time so now we've come to the point let's say we need some plastic filler well where would we get that what type of plastic is this i don't know what filler to get well the good news is you know on something like a headlight in most plastic parts there are a lot of just random gussets and things like that that we can steal a little plastic from so we're gonna do that so i know right this is off of one of my old trucks so i'm not gonna be using this but i know the tabs that i can steal from so like right here is a big gusset that we don't need the whole gusset it's hidden behind the bumper we're gonna shave take a utility knife and shave a chunk of plastic off so now you can see i have my plastic filler rod it's just like mig welding or tig welding now if we're trying to fill a large crater this this isn't i can just blend this in with the plastic sorry there but let's say we're missing a chunk we can work this in to the repair we just put it on top slowly again slow and steady i think is slow and steady is the best thing you can do when it comes to plastic welding you don't want to overheat it you don't want to work too quickly and then boom that comes right off and just like that we have fixed that tab so now now some people are in the glue world which glue is great but you have to have it on hand glue goes bad i've gotten 10 to 12 years out of this plastic welder and i'm sure it has many more left in it so it's nice to keep around things are only being more and more plastic so it's a really cool skill to have just like that you're now a plastic welder it really is qui it really is simple get some practice get an old junk head like headlight like this and practice before you try on the real deal if you're trying to repair a part on your car it's really important again practice practice practice on something else really all you need is a heat source and some stainless steel mesh you'll be good to go and remember you can always steal filler rod off of another part in off of another piece off of another area in that piece plastics are molded with many access gussets and chunks and pieces that you really don't need on them that you can shave off of the utility knife and use that as a filler rod and you can see this is a a very valuable skill to have let's you know this headlight alone is i think about a hundred bucks we just saved a hundred dollars in less than five minutes with a tool that cost 25 so you can see the power in this imagine a piece imagine a dash panel or an engine cover an engine shield they cost much much more than that it just shows you how valuable this skill in this tool is and again go check out the tool review check out the tool review video i talk a little more in depth about the tool tool itself and what you get and what to look for please like and subscribe and you can follow me on instagram to see more of stuff i have going on the shop quick tips and tricks and as always i'm jim murphy and i'll see you in another video [Music] you

Channel: You Break It You Fix It

Views: 1,447,230

Keywords: rexraynor, plastic welding, plastic welding bumper tabs, plastic welding bumper repair, plastic repair kit, plastic repair epoxy, plastic repair welding, plastic repair, snap on tools, mac tools, matco tools, craftsman tools, kobalt tools, home depot, diy, paint and body shop, paint and body work tips, chrisfix, chrisfix head gasket, chrisfix headlight, paint society

Id: 44lih_dnhuo

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020