Mary bought a pair of Revlon tweezers a while ago, picking a Name Brand to avoid hassles with bottom-dollar crap:
Well, that didn’t work.
I contend that the only difference between Name Brands and the bottom-dollar crap I tend to buy is a bit of QC and a lot of price. I’ll agree that’s not strictly true, but it does fit a goodly chunk of the observed data.
Anyhow.
I milled a recess into the corner of some scrap plastic to locate the handle end, then arranged a step block to capture the business end:
That setup ensures the holes go into the corresponding spots on both pieces, because I couldn’t figure out how to clamp them together and drill them both at once. I drilled the other piece with its good side up to align the holes; doing it bad side up would offset the holes if they’re not exactly along the center line.
A closer look:
Talk about a precarious grip on the workpiece!
I filed the welds flat before drilling, so the pieces lay flat and didn’t distract the drill.
Then:
- Center-drill
- Drill 2-56 clearance
- Scuff up mating surfaces with coarse sandpaper
- Apply epoxy
- Insert screws
- Add Loctite
- Tighten nuts to a snug fit
- Align jaws
- Tighten nuts
- Fine-tune jaw alignment
- Apply mild clamping force to hold jaws together
- Wait overnight
- Saw screws and file flush
- Done!
The clamping step:
Those nicely aligned and ground-to-fit jaws were the reason Mary bought this thing in the first place.
The screw heads look OK, in a techie sort of way:
The backside won’t win any awards:
But it won’t come apart ever again!
There’s surely a Revlon warranty covering manufacturing defects, printed on the long-discarded packaging, that requires mailing the parts with the original receipt back to some random address at our own expense.
Ptui!
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Step 14 – lacking loctite, stake the nut to the screw to prevent it from working itself loose with a dent made by a sharp center punch between the two
Oops: left that out of the list. Good catch!
Some people, of late, would have begun this by scrounging a transformer from a microwave and building a spot-welder from it. There are some cool videos on youtube showing how. I have this dead microwave taking up space in my garage for exactly that purpose… Now if only my wife’s (good thing I didn’t go with wives’) tweezers would break.
I thought about soldering / welding, but didn’t want to strip / repaint the thing when I was done. The screws and nuts are, admittedly, fugly, so I’m not sure they were a net win.
For soldering, though, I’d have used my microwave-to-soldering conversion from long ago, with carbon electrodes rather than tweezers. It still doesn’t have a case, which is starting to worry me.
Speaking of tweezers, those SMD tweezers come in handy, too.