[TowerTalk] Hot melt..

[Ian White GM3SEK]

Bill Winkis wrote:
>
>It works...just took down a set of antennas that were up for 9 
>years...and the match, etc was sealed and waterproof''d with hot melt 
>and after all these years it was still good....
>Took a low temp torch and dripped it all off, and the joints were as 
>shinny as when I put it up.....the braid on the co-ax was still shinny. 
>Trick is you've got to get it hot so the melt will "Flow" and seep into 
>the braid etc.....
>
>Am now building a 4element quad and will use hot melt to seal the 
>wire-co-ax joints....and oh yes they make a gas fired cordless hot melt 
>gun for tower work....will give you about 2 hours of work time.
>
That's good news, Bill - could you post some details or a link, please?

>Now I wonder if there are any grades to the hot melt it self, like 
>good-better-best.....or different viscosity levels when melted...???

It would be very hard to improve on the cheapest garden-variety white 
translucent stuff. This is amorphous polypropylene, which used to be a 
waste product when a batch of raw materials failed to polymerize into 
regular polyproplyene. Then some bright spark said "Hey - look what this 
stuff does!" and they started digging it up out of landfill.

There are harder or softer varieties, and also a lower-melting variety 
which is sold for use by children, but I don't know how good their 
sealing and RF properties are. Since the regular stuff is so good, there 
really isn't much incentive to find out.


-- 
73 from Ian GM3SEK         'In Practice' columnist for RadCom (RSGB)
http://www.ifwtech.co.uk/g3sek