Honda Plastic deck repair

[Cfs]

I am wondering if anyone has any success with hot staple welding cracked Honda plastic decks. I have a unit with a couple of cracks and I am considering trying a hot staple plastic welder. Would love to know what anybody’s experience has been
CFS

 

[bertsmobile1]

Should work if you slip some stainless mesh on the outside to add some strength.
Plastic welds very easy once it gets hot
Down side it has to be very clean to do this
So the best solution would be to clean it , scrape the fracture edge with a razor blade then weld it with a plastic welding rod of the correct composition.
Some where on it should be the recycle mark that will tell you the approximate type of plastic
I have both a hot air gun & a slip onto a soldering iron type but the hot air gun is the usual tool as it does a better job and rarely ever burns the plastic .

 

[Cfs]

Bert
The process I am referring to uses a gun that heats a staple that melts into the plastic bridging the crack. Sort of like a series of sutures over an incision. Do a Google, Youtube or Amazon search for HOT STAPLE PLASTIC WELDER and get a look at what these things do. The staples are maybe an inch wide, with different shapes for different types of and locations of cracks. sort of like a branding iron it melts itself into the plastic and the plastic sort of fuses around the staple bridging the crack I have a hot air plastic welder and have used a soldering iron and or a solder gun to fuse plastic...I was unaware of this hot staple process
It doesn't repair a crack making it leak proof but instead adds structural strength. There is a YouTube video of a guy repairing cracks in a John Deere tractor hood...check it out and let me know what you think. I am going to order one from Amazon and check out how it works

 

[bertsmobile1]

Hot staples are generally used on things like car bumper bars
They are a bit tricky to insert and prevent the proper fusion of the crack and the resulting patch is no where near a s strong as the properly welded part
They are used in the auto trade because they are quick & cheap and the joint will be filled in with a glue style filler , usually a construction grade of sikaflex then sanded back & painted over
Bumpers are not a load carrying part.
The deck of a mower is both load carrying and subject to vibrations so I seriously doubt staples will do the job
Unlike metals ( or wood ) plastics are like ceramics and have no grain so a properly welded crack should be 100% the strength, durability & vibration resistant as the original material
The trick is getting a full depth weld, and not burning the parent plastic which requires really careful temperature control
Burning does not mean having flames coming off & /or charing the surface, it simply means getting the plastic so hot that the active molecule ends grab onto an O2 or H2 molecule from the air thus deactivating the bond so it molecule can not bond onto the weld material or the other side of the crack .

 

[Cfs]

Hot staples are generally used on things like car bumper bars
They are a bit tricky to insert and prevent the proper fusion of the crack and the resulting patch is no where near a s strong as the properly welded part
They are used in the auto trade because they are quick & cheap and the joint will be filled in with a glue style filler , usually a construction grade of sikaflex then sanded back & painted over
Bumpers are not a load carrying part.
The deck of a mower is both load carrying and subject to vibrations so I seriously doubt staples will do the job
Unlike metals ( or wood ) plastics are like ceramics and have no grain so a properly welded crack should be 100% the strength, durability & vibration resistant as the original material
The trick is getting a full depth weld, and not burning the parent plastic which requires really careful temperature control
Burning does not mean having flames coming off & /or charing the surface, it simply means getting the plastic so hot that the active molecule ends grab onto an O2 or H2 molecule from the air thus deactivating the bond so it molecule can not bond onto the weld material or the other side of the crack .

 

[Cfs]

So your thoughts on using staples to fix a mower deck is that it won’t hold up Would you use a hot air welder? What plastic welding rod material would you use for a Honda deck? From memory it seems like there are 4 or more different formulas of plastic rods.

 

[StarTech]

The Honda is a NeXite plastic. It is made of thermoplastic composite materials, and the latter includes a blend of polypropylene and mineral fillers that may include talc, calcium carbonate, and glass fibers.

So you need polypropylene welding rods or use HDPE donor plastic strips fused into super clean crack and as Bert suggest a re-enforcement mesh added to increase the joint strength. Don't over heat the plastic as it will become very brittle as it dries out. Otherwords just heated to the melting point and not much beyond that.

 

[bertsmobile1]

Most plastic welding supply companies will do filler rods of the right composition for you Honda and funny enough in the right colour
The only funny rods I have are for JD who also use a NeXite blend
You only heat the deck till it starts to look glassy
If it droops then it is way too hot
Plastics are by nature hard & brittle ( think of perspex )
They remain pliable because of additions of chemicals called "plasticisers "
heat & UV drives these out of the matrix thus they become brittle
If your deck has already gone brittle then trying to fix it is good money after bad so your only recourse is an aluminium plate on the top & pop rivets from underneath

 

[upupandaway]

Are you the original owner? It it not the gray deck? I don't know if it was all models but they did advertise lifetime warranty on those decks.