Plastic welding

Okay kiddo, let's talk about plastic welding! Imagine you have two pieces of plastic that you want to join together. How can you do it? You can't use glue like you would with paper because plastic doesn't stick together like that.

Plastic welding is a way to join plastic pieces together. It's kind of like how you use a glue gun to melt glue and stick things together, but instead of using glue, we use heat to melt the plastic and join the pieces together.

First, we need a special plastic welding tool. It's a bit like a hot glue gun, but instead of a stick of glue, we put in a piece of plastic that's the same type as the plastic we want to weld. This special plastic is called a welding rod.

Once we've got our tool and our welding rod, we need to prepare the plastic pieces for welding. We need to clean them and make sure there's no dirt or grease on them. Then we line up the pieces and clamp them together.

Now it's time to start heating up the plastic welding tool. It works by heating up the plastic welding rod and the plastic pieces at the same time. When the plastic gets hot enough, it melts and starts to blend together.

As we move the tool along the seam where the pieces meet, it melts the plastic and blends it together. It's like drawing with the plastic and the heat from the tool.

Once we've gone all the way along the seam, we turn off the tool and let the plastic cool down. The melted plastic will cool and harden back into a solid piece, and the two pieces will be joined together.

And that's it! We've used plastic welding to join two pieces of plastic together. It's a bit like magic, but really it's just using heat to melt and blend the plastic.