Reparing Broken Pewter Statue

A little history about this statue. A neighbor brought this statue to me to see if it could be repaired. It was part of a matching set that his grandfather had brought over from Scotland years ago. He had taken it to a shop to be repaired and the repair did not work. I told him that I would look into it and see if I could find a shop to repair it. None of the places I contacted wanted to try to repair it. I talked to him about using JB Weld to repair it. I have had great sucess using JB Weld repairing different things, but since it was an antique that he valued I would be really nervous about using it. He said at this point he would try anything and would appreciate it if I would try to repair it. Most of the research I did on pewter repair said do not use epoxy to repair pewter so I was very reluctant to try it but he kept insisting so here is how I repaired it. The repair worked well and he was happy with it. I would only try this repair on pewter after you have exhausted all of the recomended methods of pewter repair but I will say this worked for me.

My plan to repair this statue was to drill a 1/16" hole down into the base where the hole from the upper piece would match. Then cut 1/16" welding rod to fit up into the top piece as far as it could go and leave enough of it sticking out to fit into the hole in the base. Since the top was hollow and the hole in it was larger than the rod I was inserting into it I planned on adding extra epoxy into the upper piece so that when held upright it would flow down around the rod and strenghten the lower portion of the leg. Since this epoxy needed to flow down around the rod I used the JB Weld Original epoxy that had a longer set time. In order to support the statue while it was drying I built a stand from wood that held it solidly at the proper angle. Masking tape was used to prevent epoxy from getting on statue.

I let the statue dry on the stand for 24 hours, the recommened time for maximum strenght as stated in the directions. I then removed the statue from the stand and cleaned and filed the repair area to match the markings on the shoe. I mixed paint until I came close to the color and then painted the repaired area.