Dashboard retaining nut fixtures - any ideas on how to reassemble this?

[wildejon 7]

Well, this is fun. These were OK last time but this time (after a garage had their hands on it), the retaining nut fixtures are all broken

Does anyone have any smart ideas how to work around it to put it all back together?

Edited February 8, 2022 by wildejon
(I can't remove the last photo, I can only add it more times, lol)

[DamirGTI 345]

You'll need aluminum wire mesh , some donor bits of the same type plastic (any interior plastic scrap parts will do) or "PP" plastic welding rods , plastic welding gun or lowest wattage soldering iron or preferably both .

 

What you'll need to do is kinda hard for me to describe with words .. let's say , you'll use alu. wire mesh as an reinforcement and for joining broken/cracked areas and as an base for missing parts .. cut to length as needed , even ground down into very small pieces for areas like around cracked screw mounting holes , then heat fused into the plastic and modeled as per needed missing shape then covered with the molten plastic to restore missing/broken mounting points/areas .

 

Helps massively if you have/keep broken bits and pieces . If not , will need to reconstruct with the wire mesh .

 

What ever you do .. don't bother with glues . To this day i know maybe just one glue which works for "PP" and that one is an industrial type kinda hard to get to for DIY and in smaller quantities ... other glues (cyanoacrilate aka superglue , epoxy 2pack .. etc) simply do not work long term , they will hold up for a while but no longer than a few months till the repair parts start crumbling down .

 

D

Edited February 8, 2022 by DamirGTI

[joris_andriesse 8]

On 2/8/2022 at 9:13 AM, wildejon said:

Does anyone have any smart ideas how to work around it to put it all back together?

 

Mine looks more or less the same. The top one I recently repaired (I have to say, I had a little bit more of material left) with a piece of this stuf (in Dutch called something like nail strip, but Google gives very different results using that search frase :p ). I had the iron clips, in which the screw holds, clipped over it and then I glued the whole thing in place. So far, it seems to work.

 

 

[wildejon 7]

Cool, thanks both of you.
I'll try the plastic welding gun - do you know if battery powered ones exist? I have no electricity in the garage (other than the battery of course).