Anneal PE ?

[jmesawitz]

Any tips on how to anneal PE parts? My last effort involved holding it over a candle flame. It got red hot & discolored rather quickly. I think that it may have even shunk a bit. I had hoped to keep the parts metalic nature but had to paint it.

[MPWR]

Annealing metal will heat stain it- there's no way around it. For small (low thermal mass) parts like PE etchings or small (1/32") diameter brass wire, a candle flame is a perfectly good way of doing it.

[Didymus]

Why do you want to anneal PE?

Ddms

[bobss396]

Originally Posted by Didymus

Why do you want to anneal PE?

Ddms

Exactly. Plus some PE comes with a flash of nickel plate over it, there's no advantage to burning through that. Any piece of PE I ever had to bend always did so without a problem.

Bob

[jmesawitz]

So here is the piece the was giving me problems. (rather a crappy representation of it for discussion purposes)
It is a flat PE piece that gets formed into a box but one panel of the box (red) has a concave surface. From MFH for FXX

I ended up dis assembling the PE to remove the part that needed bending and assembled the box minus this piece to start.
From there I really struggled putting the curve on the small piece without leaving a hard edge from my plyers. It would not budge trying to roll it around brass rod. It was suggested that I anneal the part to get it to bend easier.
Seems I should have left this one the parts tree.

[klutz_100]

Just anneal it, bend it, glue it all together, paint it up and move on to your next part IMHO

[Didymus]

Originally Posted by jmesawitz

It was suggested that I anneal the part to get it to bend easier.

Makes sense. (I didn't ask "Why in the world did you want to anneal PE?" I just wanted to know why you did it.)

I don't know any other way to get a smooth bend on a small piece of PE.

For that matter, I don't know how to keep scored and bent PE intact. It doesn't always break, but the odds seem to be about 50/50 that it will eventually fracture.

Ddms

[hirofkd]

If I were you, I would have gently curled the red area by using a needle file, brush or anything round, then slowly bend two sides of the red area, and the rest.