Hot tub repairAuthor: Dave Date: 05.10.11 - 8:14am 5yrs ago I bought an older hot tub made in the 80s. The guy (a dealer who took it in on trade) told me it had a crack he had repaired but promised no leaks. Within a month i had a pretty good drip and had to keep adding water. At the time i didnt want to fight with it, or deal with him, so I just used a two part hand knead plumbers epoxy putty to plug it up. I did the repair while the tub had water in it, the repair was at the base of the filter container. So it always had about 1.5ft of water above it for pressure. After about 3 or 4 applications of shasing the drip, i got it all stopped up and it was fine for 5 yrs. This winter, it took to dripping again, so I wanted a better fix. The old epoxy putty had to be removed, this was not a great task. It probably would have been better to grind it all off, but I hate breathing in that much dust or getting junk in my eyes as I lay on my back under it. I decided to carefully pry and chip it off with a charp chisel and a hammer. I did open the crack up further with the force applied which was a down side. The crack was quite extensive. it went clear across the base and halfway around the lower reducer. At its widest there was about 1/8in gap clear up through. A couple months ago I had bought a $60 hot air plastic welder from harbor freight. Ive had really good experience with it making water tight seams quite easily, so I figured I would give this a shot instead of tryign to use the epoxy again (which didnt have that long of a life span) I thought the lower cap would be pvc, so I set the temperature accordingly, however it turns out it was some softer type plastic that melted at much lower of a temp. Luckily it also welded MUCH nicer than PVC and didnt have any of the nasty fumes if to hot. Below are the picts of the repair. All in all it took about 3hrs of actual welding time to get it just the way i wanted it. (This does not include the time to drain the hot tub, and slide it half way off the deck so I could get under it, or the time to chip off all the old export putty. Total time was about 10hrs by the time i got the hot tub back in place and wired up again.)   Since i didnt know what kind of plastic it was for sure, and I didnt have any extra, the repair you see below was done entirly by smearing pastic from areas adjacent to the crack.  I plugged up the drain hole with a wet rag and filled the filter housing with water. I still had just a couple tiny pin pricks of water slowly seeping through. (parts of the weld I am pretty sure I didnt really get the pastic quite hot enough so it didnt weld very deeply). For take two I went through a plastic welding rod variaty pack kit i bought off amazon. I tested the weld quality with one of the ABS rods on a non-cracked section of the housing, the bond seems very good and they both melted at the same temp, so I went with it. Final repair is below and is leak free. Hopefully they were both ABS, or at least have the exact same coefficient of expansion so no cracks develop as temperatures change.  Update: So we are now midwinter, not a single drip or crack due to temperature differential. Perfect repair! Comments: (1)On 02.06.20 - 4:26am Dave wrote:
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