Welding of the Plastic Container

Well done.

Well done.

Weld done.

Oh, never mind....

Good one.By the way you live near railway crossing? May not be getting good sleep due to trains chugging in and out.

Good morning, Suresh,

Nicely done! Can you please explain a little more in depth about welding the crack with soldering rod without filler material? This sounds like something I need to add to my bag of tricks.

Thanks!

Spooky

Hi,

As I said earlier,I tried to fix the crack with m-seal epoxy with hardner. It did not work as water continued to leak. I talked to the mfr. of the m-seal they told me it can not be used for fixing cracks in plastic moulded containers as surface is smooth. So I thought of welding, I tried with small plastic component and found it working. I have ordinary hand soldering gun which is used for soldering electronic components. As crack was vertical around 5" long I tried to stich horizontaly around 1/4" width welds, lucky I found that plastic was melting and self joining. Finally crack was sealed. I filled the container fully with water and found that leakage has stopped.

I felt that I should share my this experience with my friends in CR4 so I posted this blog.

A number of hot-air tools are available as well as filler rods for welding a wide variety of plastic materials. Try auto body suppliers.

If you use similar material to melt and fill the crack, it will sustain for longer time. You should also keep temperature at low levels otherwise material burns and cracks re appear

gopalakrishna jv

The two most common processes used for forming polyethylene are blow-molding and roto-molding.

Blow-molding uses primarily homogeneous poly resin. Often the waste / trim is separated as part of the process and is immediately ground / pelletized and fed back into the hopper to be remelted consumed in the process. Very efficient for high volume and repetitive applications such as water bottles etc.

Roto molding can be done with either cross-linked or non-cross-linked resins. Both exhibit high impact strength and a wide variety of working conditions...as such, they are suitable for applications such as fuel tanks for Agricultural and Construction equipment, chemical tanks, etc. Wall sections in roto molded vessels can be made with embedded reinforcements and/or variable wall sections to provide localized reinforcements, mounting bosses for lifting lugs / brackets / sending units / etc.

Roto molded tanks can absorb the chemicals they store...so "re-purposing" of tanks can be problematic, especially where the tanks have been used to store diesel fuels and/or chemical fertilizers etc.

"Heat welding" of tanks can be done...using similar resin formulations...but aged tanks may prove problematic, due to the absorption of the stored chemicals as noted above. It is "unusual" to repair such a molded vessel "without" using a like feedstock, though...as the molded forms have a memory and the repair prove to be temporary/not structurally sound unless the vessel is supported / restrained both during and well after the repair is completed.