i just thought i would make a simple yet effective way of fixing plastic.

on my side skirt my plastic was cracked:


as you can see it was bad


so before anything else, what i did was i cleaned the crack and the surrounding area with water, dried it off real good and then took some rough sandpaper to it (as you can see in the top pics). i did this to the inside of the side skirt. made sure it was nice and rough.

next i took a a chunk of black plastic (same kind as my side skirt is made of) and i started to heat it and putting it up against the crack, working my way down. i also heated the actual side skirt and brought melted plastic to the crack.


once it was done i took the solder tool and smoothed out the edges and what not, made it look half decent.
this is what it looks like after its done soldering


once it dried i kinda tested it to see how durable it was. it was and it wasnt. i had to make sure it was durable. so i started on the outside of the skirt. i did the same thing, washed it, sanded it down, then took another strip of plastic and melted it into the crack.


after it was done, i let it cool down. now this was the show side of it, i didnt want to look like that. so i roughed the melted plastic down again with rough sand paper. and then smoothed it out with finer sand paper.
i knew there would be pits and what not, but thats ok cause the crack was under the car and the repair job wont be that noticable.


so next what i'll do is put some kind of a glue (black) to make it secure and fill in the holes, then sand it again. the inside i didnt have to worry bout sanding cause no one will see it.
you can probably get the trim paint but with this sort of plastic being smooth (unless you sand it) it'll just flake off. but in my case i'll just spray a lil trim paint on the crack area. and it'll be fine.


this DIY is simple. yet effective. even a noob can do it. (shrugs) just thought i would put something technical for a change on here.

please no flaming

 

OK....you can say it.....your not all replying cause it looks like ****......right?!

 

I did a similar repair on a free front bumper that had a finger sized gash in it, I push the piece back in, then heated it with a blow torch and used plastic shavings from inside the bumper as "glue" and cooled and smoothed it down with a near frozen can of Pepsi. it came out decent and I only cost about $.50

 

I think it's a good fix if you paint over the molding with that dupli-color molding paint.