Well, I tried my hand at plastic welding about a week ago. Some may remember that I had a bit of a run-in with a treea while back that did a number on my headlight assembly. I got all the guts pretty well straightened out, but the plastic shroud was pretty well cracked. Here it is with the white decal removed.

Sorry about the big pics. Photobucket decided not to resize them for some reason.





You can see that the crack is pretty bad. You also see that one of the mounting tabs broke off. Actually, the top 2 broke off, but you can only see one in the pic.

The first step is to tape one side of the part together with duct tape.


Next you use the welding tip to melt a V-shaped groove along the crack. If you have not seen a plastic welder, it is basically a glorified wood burning tool with a hole through it to feed a little urethane rod. This step is done without the rod, though, because you are digging a channel to put in new melted plastic. Here's the groove I dug in the back of the part.


Next it got a little messy. The kit came with various colors for the plastic melting rods. I tried the green one even though it was not close to Kawi green. I was not able to work as quickly as needed, so the feeder plastic degraded some in the welding tip and turned a nasty brown. I am glad I started on the back so I could learn the lesson there.


Things got a lot better on the front. I used the clear melting stick, plus my technique improved greatly. Here is the result.


Lastly, I had to use a similar approach on each tab to weld them back on. The final product seemed just about as strong as the original part, albeit not quite as attractive. You get a closer look at my green-brown first weld in this pic as well.



All in all it was not too bad. Like I said, I am glad I started on the back of the part. Once re-installed, it looks pretty good. I will probably sand the front down pretty well and put a decal of some sort over the weld to hide it altogether.

BTW, the kit cost $38 or so from RockyMountainATV, so it was a lot cheaper than the $70 part from Kawasaki.

 

I wondered how that setup worked. I thought it was like soldering where you fed the rod in from the side not actually through it. The front came out quite good I think. Not only did you save some cash but now you can repair other plastic stuff..........should the need arise.

 

That came out amazingly well, I think, especially if it is strong and holds. I might have to check into one of those.

 

I've done some pvc welding before I did'nt know you could weld plastic. When I got brown in the weld it was from to much heat or not enough air from the unit. It sure made a strong weld though. The pipe would break before the weld.

 

Yep, ol guy, in my case it was too much heat, or to be more precise, heat for too long. The unit is designed to reach just the right temperature for working with urethane. My problem was that I was pretty slow with it at first, so the stuff stayed in the element for too long and degraded. As it turned out, though, it would have looked like crap on the back even if I had worked more quickly because the green color just did not match well. The clear urethane weld material is the way to go.

 

Good stuff CW.

 

plastic welding is sweet Ive plastic welding just about every peace of plastic on my old beat up atc,it works great

 

Cool!

Like I always say, you gotta learn something new everyday, so today, I learned about plastic welding.

Man, is this a great forum or what?!??

 

That's exactly why I decided to give it a go. I was tempted to just replace the part, but I figured it was worth a little gamble to see if I could do it. I will feel a lot more confident on my next attempt. I hope I don't need any more practice for a while.