Weller 8200 Repair

I have a Weller 8200 soldering gun from my childhood. The bakelite case was pretty beat up, and held together with old dried-up electrical tape.

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One half was intact ...

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... but the other half was broken into several pieces, was missing the louvers, and had a big chip missing.

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I epoxied the broken pieces back together.

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Then I filled in the missing chips with epoxy putty.

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After coarsely filing the epoxy putty to shape, I filled it with auto body spot putty and did some fine filing and sanding. It's not perfect, but it's good enough. I didn't bother to replace the louvers.

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After a coat of glossy black paint, I think it looks great.

As I recall, the original screws (which long ago went missing) were thread-cutting. I couldn't find anything at McMaster-Carr that matched, so I ended up using 6-32 brass machine screws. The threads cut by the old screws were enough to hold things together.

© Steve Byan 2011-2019