Atari 2600 Restoration (repairing Broken Plastic)

by Andrew Hannay in Living > Video Games

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Atari 2600 Restoration (repairing Broken Plastic)

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I bought an Atari 2600 from ebay, only to find when it arrived that it had obviously been bashed at some point and a large chunk of the corner had broken off. This wasn't obvious from the ebay pictures and I was a little annoyed as I had done a buy-it-now for what I thought was quite a lot of money (£30).

This instructable shows how I reconstructed the broken part and cleaned up the rest of the console. I also converted the RF output to an A/V output, but somehow forgot to take many pictures of that part although there is plenty of infomation on the internet on how to do that.

Supplies

Old Soldering iron with a tip that you don't mind getting messy.

Black plastic bits (maybe from a black box that you don't mind sacrificing) or you can buy plastic repair strips from ebay for repairing plastic parts

Phono socket and wire for the electronic parts and a decent sodering iron (or the same one as above if you don't have another one)

Fixing Broken Plastic

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​I'm not very good at writing descriptions so I always try and show a load of pictures. Basically I used an old soldering iron to melt the area slightly and then melt plastic welding rods onto the area to build it up until the plastic takes roughly the right shape but bigger than it needs. Then I used a knife and sand paper to shape the area until it looked like the opposite side. The final part was to use a modellers plastic weld solvent, dip my finger in it and dab the area to give it a speckled surface.

Cleaning It Up

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Just the cleaning to do here

Electronics

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You'll have to look up how to do this online