Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Has any member bought or used a plastic welder for use on blue barrels?

What brand and model?

Where did you purchase it from and the price?

Experience of members who have used them for welding on blue barrels?

Thank you, cheers

In one of those strange coincidences, I took mine out of it's box for the first timeabout an hour ago, so my experience with it so far is about 10 minutes worth..

It seems to do what it's meant to do, I just don't know how to do it yet..

It's a pretty cheap one from ebay, the same as this one: www.ebay.com.au/itm/220V-1500w-Plastic- ... 1101533194

There's other cheaper ones but they're only 1000w, and there's others that don't come with all the tips, etc, that one seemed like the best deal short of paying the price of a small car for a 'proper' one..

Nat has got a fair bit of experience with plastic welders, Im sure he will chime in.

Amph will look foreward to your future experience.

Charlie thank you, cheers

Good luck with this one bear, I'm sure I can assist by offering a few projects for you to practise on.

Thanks mate, a good TA is always required but you will do.

Bear, did you thought about a soldering thing to use for it? PE can be easily joined that way. For thinner material you can even use an iron to "weld" it together. There are a load of videos on YouTube about it. Look for plastic welding and take it from there.

So is it just a hot air gun with a tip that can feed in plastic filament/rod ?

Yep, seen them before and was not interested for those prices. Hot air gun Makita can do the same, as an soldering iron too.

Have you used a normal hot air gun Domani ?
What do you do for the tips ?

Only experimenting on PE shopping bags, making multi layers of them. Used a hot iron at first with baking paper between the plastic and the iron. Works!

Hot air gun only let's the stuff shrink. The Makita comes with different tips in the box. One is a kind of lip where the hot air is blowing against. Used that and it worked pretty good, but not perfect as I would like to see it. My plan was to connect sheets of greenhouse PE that way to make one big sheet. Need to cover a high tunnel of 12x35 meter and would like to avoid overlaps (possible future trouble). Maybe need some more practice to get it right, but it has no priority at the moment.

If you would like to use a more pointed heating tool, a soldering tool will do very good. Many examples on the web for that. If you would like to add plastic to the weld, just take a rod of plastic and feed it into the hot area, just like TIG welding. Seen some videos about that technique on YouTube, too.

If I'm correct PE welds perfect at temperatures of 260-270C.

Thank you Paul

Iv used lighters soldering irons normal hot air guns and just recently iv been playing with a cheap plastic welder from China.

The normal hot air guns don't have the temp control required so are no good the soldering iron was ok and the plastic welder i havnt had to much time to play with but seems to work well

Thank you to every one, for what I want to do I believe I will have to go with the welder and just experiment. Cheers

Thanks for posting this, you taught me how to fix pvc pipe inadvertently

I found this post the day after I ruined some light 4" pvc I was cutting holes in to run plastic cups of media. There was an old 5.6w "applicator" pen style soldering iron device in a load of salvaged items left over from after a tenant vacated a rent house. After heating the pvc I bunched up some plastic bag tightly and melted it into the heated pipe. After a couple of leak tests and resoldering the pipe no longer leaks.

On google one can find many instructional videos to watch the process beforehand.