Plastic repair stuff, found a great one!

There is a discussion on band aid repairs, I usually use shoe goo, after a bud and I tested shoo goo and my old fave, liquid nails for repairs for a survey instrument. Well I tried the liquid nails and it failed, we tried his shoe goo and it won.

So last week a broken plastic handle. Now I was getting a bit sensitive because everyone was kidding me about, don’t worry shoe goo will fix it. So reading reports shoe goo came in second place for plastics for jbweld plastic weld. Could not find it and ended up buying loctite epoxy plastic bonder. Now I have to say that stuff was incredible!
Shoe goo is a great glue, but this loctite stuff actually seemed to melt the plastic, then the epoxy hardened and all was good. Now it says does not work on some plastics, mostly the flexible ones.

So I mixed the 2 part epoxy with a plastic tab from an inverted spray paint can on an old black 2 1/4 floppy disc. I started getting some gray matter, as I was mixing with the plastic tab. Smothered it on to the plastic handle, my thriftiness to avoid a 3 hour estimate at $125 per hour plus parts to fix the broken plastic handle on a locator.

Well the plastic paint can top tab I mixed the 2 parts with pulled right of as easy as pie after a day, though 5 hours cure time was suggested, so I said this is garbage, should have used shoe goo,

Then I look at the floppy that was the mixing surface, it was like it had been melted and reformulated!

So after the weekend I took off the gorilla tape that was stabilizing the plastic handle, and sure I had over glued it. Luckily a ribbon cable on the inside of the handle pulled right out of the glue, wrong plastic for the glue, but had to file the excess off the outside of the handle It was that hard! Guy said today, It is still holding, but I have been trying not to abuse it, I said test it all you want, I think it will be fine or we send it in for repair. I am optimistic the repair is as strong as the rest of the plastic and it will not break in the same place twice.

Not spam :slight_smile:

Nice to hear the repair worked

BTW . . . I think you actually meant to say “5 1/4 floppy disc”

You mentioned “2 1/4 floppy disc” . . . :wink:

There were 2", 2.5", 3", 3.5", 5.25" and even 8" floppies (there is a bad joke in there but I won’t say it). Although the 3.5 and 5.25 were far and away the most popular in the consumer market.

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The mind is a wonderful thing to waste, Must have been a 3.5" my bad. Confused with 2.5" hard drive I think.