My Kubota hood was cracked when I bought the tractor in 2017. I finally decided to do something about it and bought a $24 kit on Amazon to do hot staple welding. Below is a photo of the cracked area. It is at the hood latch. Maybe something dropped on the hood and cracked it, who knows.
Next is a photo of the underside of the hood. The cracks aren't very visible but they are there nonetheless.
And of course I had to remove the hood stabilizer and headlights to get to the cracks. That was a job in itself.
Next is a photo of the repair kit. It came with four hundred wire staples in various shapes, plus a wire cutter to clip off the staple legs after the staples are melted in place. I guess they aren't really staples, but that's what they call them. They are really just squiggly wires that get heated up from the gun and melt into the plastic.
My first crack at this (no pun intended) turned out as good as I could have hoped (see below). I tried to embed the wires halfway into the plastic. I certainly didn't want to melt all the way through the hood. That would have ruined my day.
This next photo shows the staple legs clipped off and ground down. I was also able to fix the standoff that had also been broken. You can see the broken parts in the above photo, and the repair below (the right standoff). I took one of the staples and bent it into a circle as best I could, then melted it into the top of the standoff.
Funny thing (NOT), the engine cowl broke as I was trying to fit it back onto the tractor and over the exhaust pipe, so I got to fix that as well (see below). Oh joy, delight...
All back together and looking pretty good.
No comments:
Post a Comment