Wichita, KS
I recently bought a Data East Robocop. This pin has two plastic ramps that get lots of abuse and really take a beating. Both of the ramps on this pin are cracked and an attempt was made by somebody else to repair. It was as substandard repair attempt that I am going to fix. Fortunately, the repair attempt did not make things too much worse. But some people do not know how to fix things and usually make things worse.
I have two cracks in this plastic that have been hi-lighted by the pink sticky paper.
One crack starts at the upper lip on the plastic and has almost ran all the way to the bottom of the channel. I drilled a stop hole to keep the plastic from cracking any farther.
This shows the stop hole I drilled. The neat thing about these Robocop plastics is there are bridge rails in lots of places. These "rails" are vinyl decals that I will be able to hide my repairs behind. This stop hole can not be seen on the viewing side because of these decals.
For the first repair, I had to bond three strips of clear Lexan in three different directions to buttress the crack in three areas.
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The three repair strips are bonded on. Each strip is neatly hidden behind one of the rail decals. I was only able to use my small clamps in one area. For the other areas, I had to use some black duct tape and my fingers. The bonding agent I use sets up and get hard in about a minute so working the bond with my fingers is no problem.
Here is the viewing side. The crack is visable: I cannot make it disappear. But my repair cannot be seen becasue it is hidden behind the rail decals. But it is solid repair that will be able to handle much abuse in the future.
The second repair: Ah, yes, the second repair. The previous "fixer" did not brace the cracked area in any way. All that was done was to slop on a lot of 5-minute epoxy. There was no attempt to rejoin the crack. It was just slop some epoxy on and call it a day. No prep work to the plastic had been completed. Without proper prep work the epoxy will not stick and even with proper prep the epoxy will probably still not stick as it is not designed for pinball type plastics.
Without a proper bond, the only good thing to come from this previous repairs is that I could peel off most of the epoxy with my fingernails and get it out on my way.
( I AM SORRY. PINSIDE KEEPS TRYING TO CHANGE THE ORDER OF MY PICS AND WILL NOT LET ME UNDO IT.)
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Yeah. This is the crack. The previous fixer did not even try to close up the crack. He just slopped on some epoxy and hoped for the best. I'll need to Dremel some of the excess epoxy so the crack will close and also to just get it gone so I can make a good repair bond.
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For this 2nd repair, it was a continuation of the first repair. I bonded several strips on plastic "behind the rails" The repair is solid and well hidden and this plastic is ready to reinstall.
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Once again, you can see the crack; I cannot make it disappear. But like the other repair. the area is now solid and buttressed with extra plastic. Over to the right you can see some of the repaired area. I cannot make that go away due to the crappy way it was "repaired" the first time.
The 2nd to last pic shows what I use to do my plastics repair. And the last pic is supposed to be gone but Pinside will not let me get rid of it.
