I’m discovering the beauty of hot glue. Today, it was applied to solve some problems with the land cruiser.

broken plastic

When I was investigating a possible wiring problem, I took apart the DS door panel and broke a plastic part off of the window switch assembly.

Today, I reattached that broken bit to the assembly with high temperature hot glue. When it was attached, I applied some more glue around the fracture. Because the piece was large, I applied a liberal amount of glue.

the whole mechanism

the small part

Initial reports are that the fix is holding!

mesh pockets

The mesh pockets on the back of the front seats are notorious for becoming misshapen. After seeing some instructions on ih8mud for tightening up the slcak that develops in the shock cord in each mesh, I decided to take a crack at it.

The instructions for removing the panel were helpful. Looking at the pegs in the back of the panel and the push nut retainers that hold the pegs in place, it looks to me like someone had tried to fix this before. (The push nut was cracked and its teeth bent a little.) This made removing the push nut easier.

When I removed the nut, I shortened the cord and tied a knot in the end to catch behind the hold in teh plastic frame. While working with that cord, two of the mesh cords dropped from the frame, and it wasn’t clear how they would reattach or stay affixed in the frame again.

So I used hot glue to attach the ends of the two pieces of mesh to one another. This would keep each string from pulling out of the plastic frame.

After letting the glue cool, I wrestled the nut back on, worked to press the plastic back into place (the knot in the cord seemed to be too big), and put the panel back on the seat.

Here’s a picture of the end product.

fixed mesh