American PW Repair of Broken PW Hand

[fijidad]

I've been trying to put this back together using Super Glue, but haven't had much success.

The hand is from a 16S Elgin.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[roughbarked]

Unfortunately there is little surface area to adhere to. You may get away with soldering it but i will still require some reinforcing.

 

[gmorse]

Hi Fijidad,

If you can find someone with a laser or micro pulse arc welder, that would probably do the job, but almost any other method of joining the broken parts will look clumsy and/or won't be strong enough. It also depends on what metal the hand is made of.

Regards,

Graham

 

[musicguy]

New hands are relatively inexpensive.


Rob

 

[Jerry Kieffer]

I've been trying to put this back together using Super Glue, but haven't had much success.

The hand is from a 16S Elgin.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

View attachment 691583 View attachment 691584

Fijidad
As you have found, super glue will not work to any degree of success.

Typically these hands are made of brass as I suspect your are. If so, it can be high temp silver soldered without a lot of difficulty if properly equipped and proper procedure.
High temp silver solder has either a higher or equal tensile strength than brass depending on the alloy of each. As such, the repair can be made with a "Butt joint" without reinforcement and will equal original strength.

There are two key factors to success of this procedure at this scale.

First, an appropriate heat source must be used that is scaled to the job at hand. In a case like this, I use a Smith oxygen/acetylene little torch with the .003" office. The flame size is actually smaller than the ball in a ball point pen pre first attached photo that I commonly use when discussing micro soldering.

The second issue is that if you attempt to apply solder by hand, you will end up with a mess as mentioned by Graham.

For this type work, I work on a small junk machinist surface plate per the set up in the second photo. In doing this job, I place a small .002" thick piece of solder ribbon under the joint to be soldered per red arrow. Again the key is not to apply more solder that required. In the example, the ribbon is .002" x .040" x .090". In most cases, hands of this type are about .015" thick and the solder applied is based on estimated cavity requirements with the assembly in place.

At this point, Flux is added and all that is required is to add heat under magnification until the solder saturates the joint. Flux paste will cement the assembly in place almost instantly when heat is applied that greatly increases success rate. The Ribbon solder eliminates any contact of the assembly during the process.

Of course, the joints to be soldered MUST be clean that is a topic by itself.

Jerry Kieffer