Fixing small plastic... things

I wonder -- would this be a good application for a 3D printer? -----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Josh Dersch Sent: Friday, December 03, 2010 2:46 AM To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: Fixing small plastic... things Hi all -- Got myself a Friden 1162 desktop calculator. This is from about 1968-69 and has a neat-O keen CRT display and uses a magnetorestrictive delay line memory. Kinda cool. Mine has taken a fair amount of abuse over the years, and is currently not working properly -- at the moment it powers up (with nominal voltages, etc) and displays a normal display of all zeros, but as soon as a key is depressed, the screen goes blank and never returns. The 1162 has a rather interesting keyboard encoding mechanism (you can see a decent overview of the device & the keyboard mechanism here: http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/friden1162.html) Close investigation of the keyboard mechanism on my specimen reveals that a few of the plastic "fingers" that are positioned on the rods that move the magnets to/away from the reed switches have snapped off. I have a close up picture of what the fingers are supposed to look like at: http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/friden/normal-finger.JPG And a picture of one of the broken ones at: http://yahozna.dyndns.org/scratch/friden/broken-finger.JPG The broken fingers no longer make contact with the mechanism, and so a couple of the reed switches do not get activated properly. I'm guessing that this is at least part of the reason the machine is acting the way that it is (that it's getting unexpected scancodes from the keyboard and going off into the weeds...) I need to figure out how to "recap" these fingers. I don't have a lot of experience repairing plastic stuff like this, anyone have any suggestions? Thanks! Josh