Polyethelene tank repair

[Jerry Hammernik]

I have a couple of cracked fittings in the water tanks on my CD28. JB Plastic Weld says it won't work on polyethylene.

I've looked at plastic welders but the price range was from 185 to 250. Don't want to spend that for a one time use.

Haven't located a shop that does this near me.

Any suggestions or experience to share?

TIA

[Keith]

Hi TIA,

I had a crack at one of the fittings on one of my water tanks and welded it with a soldering iron. I think that it was 5 yrs ago and it has never leaked since. I had no experience doing polyethylene welding and simply followed instruction from tube videos. Just google polyethylene welding. You don't need any fancy expensive tool just a soldering iron.

Good luck,

Keith

[Jim Walsh]

This is how I repaired a crack discovered upon arrival in Bermuda a few years ago. I keyed the surface and cleaned with mineral spirits or acetone, don’t recall which. Then I used some West System G/flex. It is not recommended for applications where it is in direct contact with potable water but in my case it was not inside the tank. I just built up three fillets around the cracked fitting. It has held since 2015 and that includes several thousand miles offshore.
You mentioned “cracked fittings” so this may be a simple, effective, solution.

[Chrisa006]

Check with a kayak rental shop. They usually have the welder to fix that kind of thing.

[jbenagh]

I borrowed a welder to repair my starboard tank (thanks John Ring!). It was cracked around the many of the plugs and the pick up tube fitting was cracked. It also didn't get all that close to the bottom of the tank. Some parts from McMaster Carr fixed that.

[John Stone]

Hey Jerry
During the rebuild I noticed that whenever I used Gflex epoxy made my West Systems it would not release from the plastic mixing bowls and plastic stir sticks like regular epoxy would.

Then I ran across a video called the G Flex challenge. The original video, which I can’t seem to find, was produced by the guys that cut the kayak in half and repaired it with G Flex. The link below is the same video but West added an introduction to it. Anyway, if you stick with the video long enough you will see the guys try to destroy the kayak without success.

So welding or g-flex...either can work I think depending on the nature of the repair.
https://youtu.be/WCS0qrD3MQY

[Jerry Hammernik]

Thanks all for the info. Being a belt and suspenders type I'm going to try to plastic weld it using milk jug (HDPE) as the rod.

And then I'll cover it with the West GFlex.

I'll share results when it's done.