I have some small nylon 6/6 dowels that I need to fit in some brass tubes. Due to the shoulders in the brass an the mating grooves in the nylon I can't just force the nylon into the brass. I ned a good way of heating the Nylon up so that it will be more forgiving and ease in. The groove is .014 radius deep and the shoulder in the brass tubing is like wise. I was thinking about using a microwave for this, should that work? sincerely, John
You're not going to have good luck with that. Nylon doesn't really get soft like some other types of plastic. It goes almost instantly from a solid to a liquid when you reach it's melt point.
--Not sure of this "alloy" but I remember folks used to "anneal" nylon model airplane props by tossing them in boiling water for a few minutes. Worth a try anyway...
Hi John,
A microwavew willnot work as there is not enough moisture in the nylon.
If boiling water doesn't work, I used to bend some plastic by using boiling antifreeze. It has a much higher boiling point than water. I used to make bell mouth intakes for cars using PVC pipe.
I turned up a inverse bell-mouth spindle, heated the pastic for about 2 minutes and pushed it over the spindle, let it cool a bit. Worked a treat.
Nylon is also quite hygroscopic so boiling it may actually make your problem worse as the nylon may absorb water and get bigger. I belive Nylon-66 is much less prone to absorbtion, if you know whatgrade you have.
Dave
I don't know how well it will work with nylon, but I usually use my heat gun with a wrap-around shield to soften plastics.
I'd also run this by the folks over at...
news:sci.polymers
Erik
Well it will absorb up to about 8% water so microwave would be worth a try.
The glass transition temperature is 50 C and the melt temp is 255+ so you have some room to work.
A couple URLs for you if you need physical property data.
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