Friday, May 01, 2015
Turn Your Dremel Tool into a Plastic Welder!
Make:: Several years ago, Make: contributor Matt Griffin and I were hanging out and he started enthusiastically telling me about a technique for friction welding plastic that he’d just discovered. He had learned about it in a video from the awesome Fran Blanche (she of Frantone guitar pedals fame). I still haven’t tried the technique myself, but it couldn’t be easier. You simple chuck some plastic rod into a rotary tool and the friction from the spinning plastic eventually melts it in contact with other plastic parts to form a decent welded bond.
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2 comments:
I feel like this is closer to soldering than welding since it doesn’t appear that he is melting the pieces he is trying to join and I thought that was the definition of welding but I honestly don’t know. Either way, this is a really good idea. I wonder if there is a way to do this with solder because It is hard to solder without three hands and I don’t know too many people who have three hands. If you could stick a piece of solder in a gun or something and slowly paste it in place that would be epic. I also wonder what kinds of plastics this works with because 3D printing plastic has a lower melting rate. This would be great for different projects of you could do this with acrylic. I think Susan Tsu would like this better than hot glue. I can see this method, if not the exact same setup, being very useful for various joining operations.
I agree with drews comment about it being more about soldering rather than welding. the technique i think would have been very useful when i was younger because i can remember many times where a piece just fell off a toy because it just got old or was used to much. i wonder if you would be able to modify plastic objects this way too. im just thinking if you had a piece or object that you would want a certain way, you could break it off and "weld" it back in a different orientation. I dont know if it would be stable. like malleable steel i wonder if the entire piece would e more prone to breaking because the layers of the plastic have been broken. or would it even matter because the plastic was melted in the first place?
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