anyone familiar with "heat-fixing" plastic model parts?

I'm currently working on a ww2 AA gun kit and one of the steps calls for "heat-fixing" one part to another with a heated screwdriver. Has anyone tried or done this before? I'm not familiar with it. From the illustration it appears that it simply melts the two plastic pieces together so they'll hold better.

Any thoughts???

 

i'm not familiar with heat fixing.try looking it up on ask.com or ehow.com

 

Sounds stringy.

 

Whose kit is this? I can remember some old kits where the end of the axle stubs were flattened with a hot nail head or screwdriver, to keep the bogies on the model.

 

Yes this sounds like what the diagram showed. Its the Tamiya 1/35 German 20mm Flakvierling. I'll start a new thread shortly with some pics, but thanks for the info!

 

It's a doddle mate.
Use a tealight/candle and a reasonably delicate flathead screwdriver (you can do it with your knife but it's perhaps better not to potentially get it covered in soot).

You're not looking to completely melt everything, just soften enough to flatten the spindle slightly as you would a real metal rivet. Practice on a bit of scrap sprue if you're not confident enough, but it'll only take a minute or two to work out the right temperature.

Part 'F7' that you have to do this on (I keep old instructions... tragic eh) is pretty spindly, so you really will only be heating your implement for a second or two, there's no welding going on, just a flattening of that stub at the end of the sighting linkage, leaving the link itself to freely rotate.
(Just done Tamiya's 1/48 Flakvierling, and I promise you, this heating method is a damned sight more easy than the rather spindly 'Glue then cut' arrangement of the same part there .)

Good luck,
~A

 

Ha! That's exactly it! Believe it or not, I didn't use the heat fix at all, just a little dab of glue on the stub to add a little thickness, then once it dried I slipped the sighting link on and left it as is...the moving parts still work fine...I was too afraid to attempt to melt anything that small! LOL. Thanks for the tip, and nothing wrong with saving old instructions, they are cool keepsakes.

 

No mate, there's definitely something wrong with keeping old instruction .

... my excuse is that they come in handy when buying junk kits with instructions missing.





well, they have... once...