Does anyone know how to repair this broken copper logo for my stove? I tried using J-B Weld and it fell apart. The places where it is supposed to connect are very small, so there is not much surface area for the J-B weld to work. It also needs to be very precise so that the nubs sticking out of the back line up with the holes on the stove. Any and all advice is appreciated! Thank you!
You are correct, the connection points are too small to make a reliable repair.
If your logo is copper colored, I suspect your stove is “harvest bronze” a dark brown with black accents. Chambers made copper plated stoves in the 50’s, but I believe all of those had silver logos.
My guess is that this is most likely copper plated pot metal. Copper was far too valuable to use for something like this even in the 50’s and 60’s when this was probably made.
There is a large tradeoff range between result quality and level of effort.
If you want something indistinguishable from the original, I’d scan it and machine it out of brass on the Shapeoko, or get really fancy and do an investment casting. I suspect both of these are far more effort than you want to do. OTOH, some you’ve done one, you can make more relatively easily for the restoration market which seems to be active.
The copper electroplating of the part is relatively easy.
A lower effort but not 100% original option might be to cut a rectangular strip of thin sheet aluminum stainless and blacken them chemically, then glue the logo to the strip and use the original locating pins to fasten it to the stove.
You might be able to find a reproduction here:
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We could give it a try in the laser welder, but I’m not sure how well it would hold.
@nausser915 would know better that me if it might work.
Possibly you could use pins for reinforcement and epoxy them together. That should give you enough structure to epoxy to.
I wonder if you could machine/drill into some plate two precise locating holes and clear out the area you want to repair, flip it over, then TIG braze and file it back into the original design. TIG Alumina/Silica Bronze should be about that same color unless my screen is lying to me.
You can fix that with epoxy with some reinforcement . Cut some very thin plastic plates that will cover the back of the broken areas and extend to each side of the defect. Then, when you apply the epoxy apply it not only to the cracked joint, but to the back of the piece in order to hold the reinforcing plastic strip in place on the back . After the epoxy cures come back with an X-Acto knife and trim off the visible areas of the plastic strip. This allows more surface area to be glued and the reinforced area tangent to the defect plane adds stability . I have fixed several similar parts in this way . You may have to shim other areas of the logo in order to get it to bolt onto the appliance evenly.
Thank you for the suggestion. This seems doable. What kind of plastic plates and epoxy would you reccommend?
Thanks for the suggestions. I don’t know how to do any of those but I’d be interested in learning. I don’t want to spend a lot of money but I don’t mind putting in some effort. Are any of these methods expensive? Could you teach me or do you know someone who could? Thanks!
The broken piece might be solid copper. My stove has a lot of copper. The entire top is made of copper. That said, I do want to learn how to do copper electroplating, because it looks like someone coated some of the handles with copper and now it’s wearing off.
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Thats a very cool stove!
I wonder if they just used copper-colored paint.