TECH QUESTION: Esthetically Pleasing Material to Fill in Crack on Plastic Oboe? Please help.

5007 Views 9 Replies 7 Participants Last post by shmuelyosef, Jan 9, 2015

Enviroguy

Discussion Starter · Dec 7, 2011

I got a great deal on a doubling oboe for my wife for Christmas. I had bought her a pretty good vintage oboe a few years ago. But she became discouraged with it and asked me to sell it and "get it out of the house". So I obeyed as any well-seasoned husband would.

But this year, she's now asking for another oboe. So I went cheap and scored a nice modern Selmer Signet oboe off eBay at a super low price. The background on this horn is that it was bought by a tech for parts because the middle tenon socket was broken. But the tech though it was so new looking and nice that he decided to repair it.

I got it last night. And with a synthetic reed, I can play the oboe up and down with no trouble what so ever. It seems well regulated. The middle tenon joint is glued solidly together so I just now ordered a soprano sax gig bag to put it in and I'm returning the regular oboe case I ordered from Amazon. That's no problem. And I believe this inexpensive but great playing oboe will be just the thing for my wife to noodle around on and maybe even use in performance now and then.

My problem is that the repaired crack that is all the way around the center tenon socket is very visible and has left kind of a gash due to flaking. I'd like to try and fill this blemish in with some kind of epoxy, putty or other material that I can sand down and polish to match the shiny black plastic body. The crack is already professionally fix and seals. Filling in the blemish would only be for looks.

It you know what I could use to do this, please let me know. And thanks for you time. :bluewink:

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Gordon (NZ)

· #3 · Dec 7, 2011 (Edited)

I use epoxy to which I have mixed black powder pigment from a paint supplier. It's cheap.
Slow setting epoxy sticks better (and possibly harder?) than fast setting.

These days, for filling black timber, technicians more often use grenadilla powder with superglue (applied alternately into the cavity), but if you get a run of superglue over plastic it makes a most unsightly mess, especially if you try to wipe it off.

Even epoxy can mess up plastics. I use Sellotape as a masking tape on either side of the line to be filled.

Finish off with progressively finer sand paper, down to about 2400 grit, then polish with Brasso.

It might be a good idea to tap off the reinforcing ring before you start.

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Gordon (NZ)

· #6 · Dec 15, 2011

Stephen, are you saying that acrylic paint, witih its water base, mixes with epoxy? In my experience water will never remove epoxy from my fingers, so I intuitively think epoxy would not mix with water based paint.

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Gordon (NZ)

· #9 · Dec 31, 2011

Thanks, Stephen. Interesting info on the mixing.

"I daresay it's not a method that's of much use if you tend to only need to stain the glue black, and you have ready supply of spirit stain pigment - but if you want to 'go brown' it's pretty much the only way to get a decent colour match."

I have always used a variety of powder pigments, including several quite useful browns which I mix to get what I want.

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