Hey guys,
I recently got a smashed Power Tower front bezel to fix. It had been attempted to repair with some superglue, but this is of course the wrong way to go about mending ABS. My own Power Tower is in the back for comparison purposes; the one that needs fixing is also badly yellowed to a nearly brown colour (original user must have been a heavy smoker judging by the smell).
Now, there are two proper ways to fix this kind of plastic; welding and chemical bonding with acetone or similar solvent. If the pieces fit together perfectly, I would probably go with acetone here. But in this case the parts had been glued together several times with various glues, and were generally a mess. So I had to scrape the glue away and by that time the pieces had rather large gaps. Therefore I decided to weld them together using just a regular soldering iron. These are just "tack" welds to initially hold the pieces in place.
After this process they were securely together, but had severe gaps on the other side. I then proceeded to melt the cracks together completely.
By this point there was no longer sufficient material to fill the gaps completely, so I filled them in using a scrap piece of plastic. The colour didn't really match as you can see, but it wouldn't matter as this would have to be painted regardless. There was no way this could be fixed seamlessly and with the surface texture intact enough to even consider just a retrobright treatment.
Now the piece was solid, and I could carve the excess plastic away using a knife.
There was no way this was going to be absolutely smooth after this, so a thin layer of plastic filler and some sanding was in order.
The final touch was to paint the whole front panel. I used my existing front panel as a guide and got a spray paint that matched it well. The photos here aren't perfectly colour balanced, but the end result is quite a light off-white colour as it should be. I could maybe have sanded just a bit more and painted one more layer to hide the last imperfections, but oh well.
The "power" marking was lost but otherwise the end result is quite acceptable and the guy I was fixing it for was happy.
I recently got a smashed Power Tower front bezel to fix. It had been attempted to repair with some superglue, but this is of course the wrong way to go about mending ABS. My own Power Tower is in the back for comparison purposes; the one that needs fixing is also badly yellowed to a nearly brown colour (original user must have been a heavy smoker judging by the smell).
Now, there are two proper ways to fix this kind of plastic; welding and chemical bonding with acetone or similar solvent. If the pieces fit together perfectly, I would probably go with acetone here. But in this case the parts had been glued together several times with various glues, and were generally a mess. So I had to scrape the glue away and by that time the pieces had rather large gaps. Therefore I decided to weld them together using just a regular soldering iron. These are just "tack" welds to initially hold the pieces in place.
After this process they were securely together, but had severe gaps on the other side. I then proceeded to melt the cracks together completely.
By this point there was no longer sufficient material to fill the gaps completely, so I filled them in using a scrap piece of plastic. The colour didn't really match as you can see, but it wouldn't matter as this would have to be painted regardless. There was no way this could be fixed seamlessly and with the surface texture intact enough to even consider just a retrobright treatment.
Now the piece was solid, and I could carve the excess plastic away using a knife.
There was no way this was going to be absolutely smooth after this, so a thin layer of plastic filler and some sanding was in order.
The final touch was to paint the whole front panel. I used my existing front panel as a guide and got a spray paint that matched it well. The photos here aren't perfectly colour balanced, but the end result is quite a light off-white colour as it should be. I could maybe have sanded just a bit more and painted one more layer to hide the last imperfections, but oh well.
The "power" marking was lost but otherwise the end result is quite acceptable and the guy I was fixing it for was happy.