Hustler body material?

Everything I've read seems to say that if a Hustler body is not fiberglass it's HDPE. Going on that, I bought some HDPE plastic welding rods to patch some holes in mine. I'm not having much luck. The Hustler body material is liquifying and the rods just kinda get gloopy. They don't seem to want to bond to each other. Thinking that my rods might be bad, I looked around the workshop until I found some plastic labeled HDPE, and it did pretty much the same thing. The Hustler body just isn't behaving like HDPE. Are we sure it's not something else? Maybe LDPE?

Is your Hustler orange and white, with the headlights close together in the middle of the lower body, or green/brownish color with separate headlights? The orange/white machines are first gen, and made out of fiberglass. The green/brownish machines are 2nd gen, and are most definitely made from HDPE.

Brentd,

I had to fix some places in my hdpe body and I did it was a soldering gun. I had some donor plastic that came with the machine (fortunately). Depending on how much material you need perhaps you can shave a little from under the front seat or some other inconspicuous location and use it as filler. I have a Weller soldering gun that came with a flat round spade type tip. I used it to melt the donor pieces into my repair area. It worked like a charm.

Mine is the olive green color with separate lights. Definitely not fiberglass. Well, if you look at the pics in the "My New Hustler" thread, you'll see that there is a muffler between the middle and rear wheel on the "passenger" side. Whoever put that thing there used self-tapping screws to put a piece of sheet metal around the side as, I guess, sort of a heat shield. It didn't work. Where the muffler passes through the body, there was a 3-inch diameter metal flange and gasket of some sort of heat shield material, but it still melted the body pretty bad. There's about a 4" diameter hole that I've got to patch up. I've got a 12x12 sheet of HDPE on order that I intend to cut and heat form to the area then wend the edges. I have several soldering irons. I may try to form some kind of welding tip if I can't get the HF plastic welding kit to work right.

Attachment 14688Here's the tip I used.

The good thing about this method is that it concentrates the heat to precisely where you direct it, and its hot enough to pool up pretty quickly. The hustler body is thick enough that you can have a small melted pool on one side of the body without having a large area so hot that you have to be careful not to deform its shape.

If I had to make the repair you are facing, I would first ask a kind member on this site if they had a junked body from which they would share a piece of plastic. That would give you the right color and thickness. Next, I would cut it so that overlapped the repair area by about a half inch around all edges. Then heat it to form it to the right shape and make it fit tight to the body. Next, run a couple of small screws in to "tack" it in place. Finally, I would take that spade on the soldering iron and melt it into that half inch overlap area and then just melt it along the overlap, pressing the pieces together immediately behind the tip so they come together while the plastic is still melted. You'll probably need an extra hand to do a good job and will have to hold them together until the plastic cools enough to stick.

Once that is done, you could add some extra screws or pop rivets just to make sure the patch is mechanically sound.

Good luck.