What plastic is the Nikon Coolpix camera body made up of (why did glue melt it?)

I had the same problem.

I just tape it shut with duct tape.

Paul K. Dickman

I take it then that everything is ok now? Not still soft or anyting like that?

If so, ya done good, troop...

Richard

Uh, epoxy and a paper clip?

:)

PowerPoxy makes a plastic bonder. It comes in a double syringe, like

5-minute epoxy. It is said to work on all hard and soft plastics. It doesn't say that it doesn't work on polyethylene and polypropylene, but I'd be surprised if it does.

Color is kind of an ugly opaque amber.

Do you have a reference to this? I can't find anything in the Kirk-Othmer "plasticizer" entry.

Maybe you mean plasticized PVC is mixed with other plastics, not that PVC is itself a plasticizer?

"neat" PVC is not very flexible. Much of the stuff people think of when you say "Vinyl" or "PVC" is loaded with plasticizer, in some cases quite a significant percentage of the total material:

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Right, but what Lloyd said was that PVC is a plasticizer for other plastics.

I don't think epoxy does anything bad to polyethylene or polypropylene, it just doesn't stick to either worth crap.

All adhesives outgas as they dry (that's why they stink). Adhesives around optics are a true disaster unless you know what you're doing.

Some of the lightweight high-strength plastics that have been appearing in consumer products the last few years have interesting foibles. I got a pair of prescription lenses in Ray-Ban frames a few years gack. After putting the lenses in, they washed everything with acetone (evidently a common optometric practice). Literally, in front of my eyes, the frames began disintegrating and popping apart. It was bizarre, like a special effect in a sci-fi movie. Needless to say, they found another set of frames for me :-).

Tim.

I don't think that's exactly correct, but PVC can be *alloyed* with more brittle plastics such as acrylic to yield better overall mechanical characteristics.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Richard J Kinch fired this volley in news:Xns99CAA2CF947E3someconundrum@216.196.97.131:

Plasticizer might not be the right word... that's more aptly reserved for materials like the adipates I mentioned earlier.

However, when one must alter the properties of any plastic - to the more or less brittle - other plastics are co-polymerized (or merely alloyed) to effect the change. PVC has a degree of elasticity and toughness that makes it well suited to that task.

I managed an injection line once. We had several mixed plastics modified with PVC to improve toughness and impact resistance.

LLoyd

Spehro Pefhany fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

yep... whut I sed when I corrected myself above.

LLoyd

Tim Shoppa fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@k35g2000prh.googlegroups.com:

If you really want to have fun, wash any polycarbonate in any chlorinated solvent, and watch the action.

(dont _EVEN_ ask how I know that one! )

LLoyd

Wow, I'm amazed they used acetone! It's death on many plastics, though usually it just dissolves them.

I've had somewhat similar problems with cyanoacrylate accelerator, which I believe is an alcohol, getting on certain kinds of plastic. I used some in the repair of a crack in a clear plastic meter face, and the face, over the next few days, developed a whole mess of little cracks. Ooops.

One of my favorites these days for repairing plastic and other broken things is "Plas-T-Pair" from Rawn Corp. It can be a bit hard to find, but it's been well worth the hunt for me. It's a two-part system, powder and liquid. Unlike with cyanoacrylate adhesives, I haven't had trouble with it outgassing and leaving residues all over the place, though as Tim says, be careful around optics.

Cheers, Tom

I actually tried dissolving some plastics in acetone. I think one of my tries at this was on polystyrene. Guess what - I was generally unable to make acetone-attacked plastics fully go into solution, even after a couple weeks soaking in acetone, even with a small amount of plastic in a large amount of acetone. Although fairly quickly the plastic does become soft and gooey.

Now, I suspect MEK and ethyl acetate, or maybe better still some mixture of these, will make a liquid solution of many plastics. I have read a few plastic cement tubes and packages, and those have MEK and ethyl acetate.

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Tom Bruhns fired this volley in news: snipped-for-privacy@v29g2000prd.googlegroups.com:

Plas-T-Pair has been around since the mid-sixties. It was originally marketed to TV repairmen to rebuild broken tuning knobs.

LLoyd

We had a big crunch going on with a project and needed some large Lexan plates fastened together for a low frequency antenna. They were supposed to be screwed to a plate, with the screws going through the plate and into the edges of the Lexan. For some reason the technician building them up decided to "help" by adding Loctite to the process. The Lexan proceded to swell & split, so the machine shop had to crank out a new set on overtime.

Doug White

For the record, I had called Nikon Service Relations at 800-645-6678 and they basically said that many people have the problem with the Nikon Coolpix series battery latch door breaking and that it wasn't something they cared about.

Thanks Richard, The melting seemed to be from the heat of the epoxy setting (I'm guessing) because everything is hard now.

The crazy glue and the epoxy seem to be holding tightly. Wish me luck!

Thanks for all the advice! I hope other people try this and post THEIR pictures for all of us to learn from (especially Nikon).

That's EXACTLY the kind of advice we'd want in the record for the NEXT person who has a Nikon Coolpix camera with a broken battery door latch!

The "glue" (I don't know what "epoxy" means vs "glue" so I use the word glue loosly here) would have to hold the metal paperclip to the plastic camera body without pulling out from the stress of the latch.

Thanks for the advice