Plastic welding with glue gun

JohnD

JohnD

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I have a cracked wheely bin.

I hear it is possible to put plastic welding rods in a glue gun to repair such things.

Anyone tried?
 
My glue gun gets nowhere near hot enough to melt plastic but use my solder station quite a lot for plastic welding...
Usually spot weld to hold together initially by pushing the fine tip right through along the crack . If when melting it starts to smoke I turn it down gradually till it doesn't.
 
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£50 unless the binmen confess to breaking it.
 
Do some plastic repair at work on computer kit.
Soldering iron and car body repair mesh.
Smaller repairs, multicore wire. Much better than staples/solid wire as it bonds into the plastic.
Don't find that just melting works very on computer plastics. ABS I think
 
mcprinter said:
Do some plastic repair at work on computer kit.
Soldering iron and car body repair mesh.
Smaller repairs, multicore wire. Much better than staples/solid wire as it bonds into the plastic.
Don't find that just melting works very on computer plastics. ABS I think
Click to expand...
ABS can be repaired but you use acetone to glue or to make a repair slurry/goop using waste ABS rather than using heat.
 
Wheelie bins are quite low temperature melting plastics so it should be possible to melt the crack using a chunky soldering iron but it would have to be a tidy/clean crack to do it. Gluing is likely to be a waste of time.
 
I've got some plastic-melting tips to go in the soldering iron.
 
I thought that wheely bins were medium or high density polyethylene ours certainly is. There are some industrIal adhesives around which can bond the stuff (e.g. Techbond, which bonds at a molecular level), but welding thickish HDPE takes a lot more heat than a soldering iron can deliver - think more in terms of an industrial hot air gun (e.g Steinel) with an appropriate welding rod
or of using something like a fusion welder. I used to machine the stuff at one time as a "side job" and I recall the weld temperature for 1000 grade HDPE was about 300 degrees C with MDPE and LDPE being a bit lower
 
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JohnD said:
£50 unless the binmen confess to breaking it.
Click to expand...
Councils are under a legal duty to collect domestic waste, they cant charge for it, or for a bin which breaks under fair wear and tear.

Blup
 
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