Help put muffin tin back together again

October 31, 2008 9:56 AM

My sister has a stone muffin pan like this (except it is 6 jumbo muffin cups) that broke into three pieces during a recent move. She said none of the cups were damaged, so any ideas on an oven-safe adhesive to put it back together?

Oven-safe/food safe would be ideal, of course, but since the offending breaks are between the cups as long as the adhesive is oven-safe you wouldn't have any food actually touching the adhesive. I know a little about epoxies, etc (they are activated by air?) but not much about their heat-safe properties.

posted by sararah to home & garden (13 comments total)

The epoxies I have used would soften in that much heat, making for a pretty bendy and useless join. Worse, they probably re-emit fumes when heated.

You may wish to check with MeFi's own louigi for the best answer.
posted by rokusan at 10:13 AM on October 31, 2008

As an alternative to repair: since the cups are intact, she could still bake with them (just set the individual broken pieces in the oven as if they were stand-alone baking pans). If there are rough edges from the breaks, she could sand them down.
posted by amyms at 10:15 AM on October 31, 2008

This site has ceramic adhesives that have temperature ranges of 500 all the way to 4,000 deg F. cotronics
posted by Black_Umbrella at 10:20 AM on October 31, 2008

You might poke around on thistothat
posted by mattholomew at 11:25 AM on October 31, 2008

Sodium Silicate AKA water glass sometimes available at large drugstores and for gluing gaskets to wood stoves.
posted by hortense at 11:46 AM on October 31, 2008

In this, and most matters adhesive, it is J-B Weld that you seek. Stainless steel epoxy, oven heat is no porblem.
posted by dirtdirt at 12:16 PM on October 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

I would worry about toxicity of anything heat stable that will hold stone together. Personally I would just set them up on a cookie sheet to keep them together.
posted by piedmont at 1:50 PM on October 31, 2008

Seconding dirtdirt. As an offroad motorcyclist, I owe my health and safety to judicious use of J-B Weld (now available in easy-to-mix putty form). I have friends who have J-B welded their engine cases back together and it holds just fine. The only 'exotic' J-B Weld failure I've seen is when someone tried to repair a piston skirt with it. Figures, it was a KLR owner.
posted by workerant at 4:07 PM on October 31, 2008 [1 favorite]

maybe you could wire them together with an uncoated wire that could withstand the heat--consult welding supply store.
posted by beckish at 4:27 PM on October 31, 2008

uhh...as far as i know jb weld is only for metal applications, aluminum, steel, etc. I dont think it would hold ceramic together.
posted by Black_Umbrella at 5:20 PM on October 31, 2008

Second vote here for dirtdirt's idea, J-B Weld will take the heat.
posted by RobGF at 7:44 PM on October 31, 2008

One possibility..

Drill holes to accommodate wire on either side of all cracks -- you'll probably need a fancy drill bit and a hobby tool. Make U shaped "staples" from monofilament wire -- whatever wire you can find at the hardware store, I'm thinking ~18 gauge of some kind of malleable steel. Insert staples into pairs of holes, and twist open ends around each other to bring the crack edges tight together. Bend over the twisted ends so they are flat with the material, and cut off excess so that only enough twists remain to keep tension on the joint. Fill the holes and cover all of the wire with filler material.

J-B weld sure sounds promising as that filler material, but the concerns mentioned above need some investigation.. The J-B weld website says 500F and non-toxic, and the material safety data sheets list skin irritation and nausea when ingested, but nothing truly hazerdous I guess (I'm not particularly familiar with MSDSs). Basically, sounds marginal but okay on both the temperature and the health issues. Nothing beats your own experiment though.. Try baking a little ball of J-B weld to see what happens. If it doesn't stink or smoke or anything, and if you can't find specific, and well sourced contra indication (wiki answers saying "No" isn't enough for me), I'd go with it. All that said.. Don't contaminate the actual cooking surface with the J-B weld, there is no point risking direct contact.


The problem with this idea is that the expansion coefficients of the J-B Weld, the ceramic, and the metal staple will all be different.. Still, worth a try.
posted by Chuckles at 12:51 AM on November 1, 2008

We haven't tried any adhesives yet, we may go with a mechanical approach first. Thanks for the suggestions!
posted by sararah at 10:53 AM on November 17, 2008