Home >> Hobbies >> Other Hobbies

How to Test Plastic Welds

Plastic welding can be a highly difficult task to learn how to do properly. It's not easy to teach to yourself, and if you want to learn quickly and correctly it's best to have someone experienced at the art to teach you. Luckily, once you get going, testing the quality of your work is easy. This will unfortunately destroy your work, but it's a fantastic way to understand the strength of the weld, or test an entire run of welds by testing a single piece.

Things You'll Need

A plastic welded item
Ram with selected pressure
Clamps
Impact setup with selected pressure

Instructions

- 1
  Clamp your piece with the weld is exposed. If you are going to do a tension test, clamp it from the top. If you plan on doing an impact test, clamp it from the bottom. If you are going to do a bend test, support it on either end instead of clamping. Clamping makes sure that the welded piece doesn't move while being tested.
- 2
  Apply pressure to your object. In a tension test, this means that you hang greater and greater weights on the object until the weld, or the object, fractures. If the weld fractures first, the weld is weaker than the object. In an impact test, this generally means swinging a hammer-style head into the weld with a specific amount of force. There are machines that do this. With a bend test, a ram slowly pushes the weld down while it's supported on either end, so it bends in the middle.
- 3
  Observe the failure point. For the tension, test examine where the weld fails if it is the weak spot. In the impact test, see how much instantaneous pressure is needed to snap the weld. For the ram test, record the angle at which the first cracks appear. If you are able to take the weld to the tolerance you want and no adverse reactions happen, then your weld is satisfactory for what you need it to do.

Other Hobbies