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ABS adhesive failures

A customer of mine, who is also one of the top plastics fabricators in the country, just purchased quite a large quantity of Spartech ABS sheets, .236 x

4 x 8 black, utility grade with a virgin top cap. He cuts and then glues the sheets into small boxes and is experiencing complete adhesive failure--basically when the parts are removed from the form, they fall apart. He has tested every adhesive suggested by Weldon in addition to Kydex adhesives. He will also test MEK next week.

The fact that previous ABS sheets purchased direct from a different factory have been successfully glued together for thousands of parts would indicate that the new sheets are the problem. Because of the volume and sources involved, we cannot trace the sheet back to Lot and batch, so Spartech is unable to identify the particular manufacturing lot, but say they haven't heard of any other problems in this area.

Does anyone out there have any thoughts. I was thinking that moisture absorption of the sheet could be the problem, but am open to any other ideas.

Thanks

Lyle

Reply to
Fobg2000
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There isn't a whole lot of details to go on here, so here's my best guesses:

Are the surfaces clean? Having worked at 3M, this was always the first question out of the mouths of the tech sevice people. And it works about 75% of the time.

ABS does not have a unique composition, but is made up of varying amounts of the three monomers (as well as having different particles sizes for a given composition). You most likely are not looking at the exact same material. Having said this, I don't think that the variations are enough to cause the problem unless the chosen adhesive is barely working. Then small changes in composition might push it over the edge.

John

Reply to
John Spevacek

My observation over the years has been that if it is an adhesion problem with plastics, the cause is silicon, either silicon oil, or mold release spray. ICP of scrapings from the surface and from the main body, usually helps determine if the silicon is in the composition or just on the surface.

Ernie

Reply to
Ernie

The search for silicone was tackled another way here: wash the ABS surface off with acetone, let the solvent evaporate on an ATR-crystal or KBr-pressing or whatever other carrier for the IR-spectroscopy... the polysiloxane infraredspectrum is very easy to spot.

Reply to
dave.lister

You may find that the material may have too low a dyne level. Try to boost the dyne ( treatment ) level up with a corona treater. Griff.

Reply to
Griff

I glued ABS to ABS using a Activator and 3M acrylic tape #4952. The activator treated the surface for you. This was used on the Ford Think vehicle's trunk.

Tom

Reply to
Tom

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