For years this bottle of DeoxIT has been covered with a very thin layer of red juice, despite having the lid screwed firmly in place and a cap (removed here) pushed over the tube:
Turns out that there’s a minute crack in the cap. Every time I use the bottle, I refresh the oil layer on the inside of the bottle, which then gets pumped outside through capillary action. I’d been keeping the bottle in a tall ziploc baggie, specifically to contain the oil, and always assumed it was a simple leak.
The bottle still contains a lifetime supply of DeoxIT that may become a cherished family heirloom, one to be handed down through the generations. I can’t think of a better applicator, either, so I’m kind of stuck with that cap.
The cap is, of course, un-bondable polyethylene covered with thin oil, so there’s no possible way to repair it. I wiped it down with alcohol and acetone, then quick-like-a-bunny dabbed on a blob of Duco cement (which is the irregular shape on the cap) and worked it into the crack, in the hope it would stick well enough to reduce the pumping.
We shall see…
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
If the repair doesn’t work out, check out the “hypo-type solvent cement applicators” at your favorite plastics store. Tap Plastics (a mainstay on the Left Coast) sells them for $3.25 with a detachable hypo needle and a storage cap. Our techs at HP/Agilent used them to build stuff out of acrylic using MEK as the solvent.
Their website must run on a 386SX box, but they have all sorts of good stuff…
Thanks for the tip!
Sounds like a great job for a 3D printer, with a luer-lock taper and thread on top for a stock needle (available from pharmacies without a prescription in this state, your milage may vary, or over the intertubes, or I’d be most happy to drop a handful of various sizes in the mail to you since you have done so for me on other things in the past!)
Converting standard sharp-point needles into blunt-tip needles is left as a excercise to the reader with a Dremel cutoff disc…
Yeah, that thought came to mind… [grin]
But I came to my senses, slobbered on the Duco, and completed the mission.
IfWhen it leaks again, something “more better” will be in order!The Warehouse Wing has a goodly supply of blunt-needle inkjet cartridge refill syringes; perhaps I can conjure a solution from one of those.