To be clear, I’m not asking how to repair it, I’m just trying to understand in general terms why it is so difficult to repair effectively when on paper it seems like typically an easier material to work with than wood or metal (both of which are fairly trivial to repair).
Flagging this post as chemistry because I suspect that’s part of the answer, but it might very well be a physics problem instead.
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When you break wood, you don’t repair it as such. It’ll never be the same. What you can do is use a glue to hold the broken bits together. Glue works well because wood is porous, as the glue sinks in and solidifies the wood and glue can become nicely tangled together making it difficult to get them apart. Imagine soaking up a sponge full of glue and letting it set. The sponge and the glue are 2 different things but good luck separating them.
If we repair metal, is assume you mean welding? That’s handy because we liquify it and let the structure reform. It takes a skilled person with the correct tools to this, and we kind of often want to as metal products are expensive. You can glue metals, but generally/normally you’re going to lose a lot of strength there because the glue isn’t going to sink into the surface and get a good bond.
There’s a huge range of plastics that behave very differently to each other. You can melt and re-form some plastics, you can buy plastic welders and use soldering irons. It’s kind of the premise of 3d printing. Normally plastic is cheap so we don’t care to do this. It’s not that it’s more difficult, it’s just not efficient. There’s also plastics that are ‘baked’. In the same way that you can’t repair a cake with eggs, flour and sugar, once that plastic part has been made its internal structure has changed forever. Plastics are not really porous, so glues don’t work as well as they would on the likes of wood, and because the structure has changed from the raw ingredients you can’t add more ingredients to re-bake the cake as it were.
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