plastic welding

9 Articles

3D Print It Or Fix It?

May 22, 2016 by 20 Comments

[Tim Trzepacz] is working on a pretty cool MIDI controller project over on Hackaday.io. It involves, naturally, a bunch of knobs and buttons. And it’s one of these nice arcade-style buttons that broke when he slammed on his car brakes and it went flying.

He tried gluing the plastic bits back together, but we all know how that works — temporarily. Next, he thought that maybe he could 3D-print a model of the arcade button’s housing. Besides being a lot of work, [Tim] didn’t have a reliable printer on hand. But he did have filament and a soldering iron.

The rest of the story is a slightly ugly mess, but it looks like it’ll work. (And it’s on the inside of the case, after all.) A working part is a good part.

The irony here is that the original choice of 3 mm ABS filament as a printing material is that it’s cheap and available because it’s commonly used in plastic welding. And there are more elegant ways to melt the plastic than with a soldering iron. And more ways to get it melted than direct heating, like ultrasonic welding and friction welding, for instance.

But we still like to see the occasional quickly hacked together effort, at least one per day. What’s your craziest plastic welding success or failure?

New 3D Printing Technique – Friction Welding

December 30, 2014 by 34 Comments

Even though 3D printers can fabricate complex shapes that would be nearly impossible to mill, they are not well suited to designs requiring bridging or with large empty spaces. To overcome this, [Scorch] has applied an easy plastic welding technique that works with both ABS and PLA. All you need is a rotary tool.

“Friction welding” is the process of rubbing two surfaces together until the friction alone has created enough heat to join them. Industrially, the method is applied to joining large, metal workpieces that would otherwise require a time-consuming weld. In 2012, [Fran] reminded us of a toy from decades ago that allowed children to plastic weld styrene using friction. This modified method is similar to stick welding in that a consumable filler rod is added to the molten joint. Inspired by our coverage of [Fran], [Scorch] experimented and discovered that a stick of filament mounted into a Dremel works just as well for joining 3d prints.

That is all there is to it. Snip off a bit of filament, feed it into your rotary tool, and run a bead to join parts and shapes or do repairs. Friction welded plastic is shockingly strong, vastly superior to glued plastic for some joints. Another tool for the toolbox. See the videos below for [Scorch]’s demo.

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