Case front bezel repair

ajk

Active member
AmiBayer
Joined
May 16, 2010
Posts
1,053
Country
Finland
Region
Helsinki
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).

1_initial.jpg


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.

2_tacking.jpg


After this process they were securely together, but had severe gaps on the other side. I then proceeded to melt the cracks together completely.

3_cracks.jpg


4_weld_joint.jpg


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.

5_fill_weld.jpg


Now the piece was solid, and I could carve the excess plastic away using a knife.

6_cleaned_weld.jpg


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.

7_sanded_filler.jpg


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.

8_painted.jpg


The "power" marking was lost but otherwise the end result is quite acceptable and the guy I was fixing it for was happy.

9_final.jpg


1_initial.jpg
 
A job well done; awesome!!!!!!!!!(y)
Like Elerion said, what was the paint?
 
Wow, awesome work - very impressed (y)
 
:bowdown::bowdown::bowdown: OMG! That's indeed an outstanding piece of work my friend!!! :bowdown::bowdown::bowdown:

Awesome aftern00n pr0n I might add! You can't even see the damage at all!
Way to go man! (y)
 
Thank you all for the kind words. The paint I used is of the Multona brand of products; I can check the exact colour number later, though it's probably best to match the shade to each particular project anyway.
 
Nice job!

Another solution for filling the crack is available in hobby store (where they sell 1:xx plastic models of planes/ships/car). It's a putty made expressly for plastic modeling used to hide the defect in joint of those models, like the edges of an airplane wings or fuselage. It can be easily sanded and painted. The paint that you'll find there is also made for plastic and they have a wide color palette to chose from.
 
Back
Top Bottom