Yes....this is another waste of bandwidth in the gun mechanics club......but

These pictures are of an plastic injection mold manifold component.

It is housed deep inside a 16 cavity mold and uses two 220V cast-in heaters. These heaters melt the resin at a constant temperature of 450° and allows a balanced amount of resin to flow into each cavity without the wasteful runner that requires to be re-ground.

However this mold suffered a water leak during production and that led to two of the four 1mm prongs to burn/short off.

In the past we would box this up and ship the entire manifold to a repair specialist next day air and pay the expedite fee for a two day repair and then next day air it back to us.....about $2500

Not this time.....

I decided to try and repair the post by welding them up

One drop/bead at a time....straight up for about 1/2"

I did the welds and was able to rewire everything up and get this mold back in production in less than one work day.

This picture shows one prong that is finr and the other that is below flush obviously is gone from shorting out.



Here you see my ground clamp is too big to grip the heater coil's power supply so I ground a pair of curved hemostats thinner to allow a ground connection.



Not very sexy but this is about fifty+ individual single drops using a .015 316 Stainless stacked up one at a timr



Here we can see one of the vertcal beads awaiting its wire crimp



All of this work was done with a manual microscope assisted micro plasma/TiG welder

Nice.

Nicely done Ted. I have a collection of burnt up hemostats as well from saves like this. Do you think the heating element was stainless or some nickel alloy.

Kind of like removing broken Helicoils from a deep narrow hole. Good job by the way.

Dave

Some of the more, (OCD) contributors here would probably have made it .010 larger in diameter, put it in the mill and then used a mini boring head to recut it down to size.

I wonder where you get those mini boring heads?

I thought I was OCD until I realized the letters in order...

WEREN'T