I've got a crack in my fresh water tank in the Safari and a toilet fitting torn half-way loose in the Sovereign. So repairing them is the next "big effort." Here's a few threads that have addressed this problem in the past:
'85 Water Tank Leak http://www.airforums.com/forums/f444...1-a-35719.html http://www.airforums.com/forums/f444...nks-34408.html
The choice of methods, so far, are plastic welding or Scotch Weld 8005. The $30 hot air welding tool available from Harbor Freight is familiar to most, so no photo is necessary (IMHO). Here's the Scotch Weld system, about $100 for the tool, nozzles, 10:1 injector, and two tubes of glue:
I labeled the rod as "suspect" because I can't get it to glue or weld to the sheet material. Both items are labeled LDPE. As you can see in this photo, the rod material (which had been cut on a bandsaw to provide a flat face) pulled away from the sheet in the weld area and in both glue areas:
So I thought about it and decided that either the rod was bad material or the fact that I clamped it down pretty tight might have pushed all the active glue solvents out from underneath the rod, preventing any gluing action. One piece of evidence that either of these might be true is that the squeezed-out glue was stuck pretty hard to the sheet.
New experiment--try to glue some pieces of sheet to itself. One piece to be clamped down tight and the other one just placed with momentary finger pressure. I also tried to weld a piece of sheet to the sheet, but once again no luck at all. The two glued pieces are TIGHT. Neither
Bedfords nor I could break them off with hand pressure. I haven't taken any extraordinary effort to see what it would take to break them off.
Bedfords (Joe) has had good luck welding this material, but we don't know why our results are different. He left some of his material with me to experiment with (a $2 cookie sheet--why did I order the industrial stuff for $40?). I'll test weld his material and report those results.
The next big task is to test the sheet material on the tanks. The cold weather here may delay that for some time...
Zep