Photo: Buckmasters Life Member Roger Hanneman shares a fix-it tip he used to repair the broken foot on his decoy. The longtime hunter from Nebraska poses here with a nice buck he took with his bow.
My tip is a little different than most Buckmasters Tips of the Week, but I think it will be very useful to hunters for a multitude of fix-it purposes.
When I accidentally broke my deer decoy, I used a woodburning pen tool and a plastic jug to fix it.
After a bowhunt on a very cold day, I broke off part of the decoy’s leg when I tried to pull up the stakes from the frozen ground. It was the part that you drive the stake through, and my decoy would not stand up without it.
I’ve actually done this a couple of times, and if you’ve used a decoy on a frigid day, you’ve probably done this, too.
When I returned home, I cut strips from a plastic ice cream container and used my woodburning tool to melt the plastic and reattach the broken part of the decoy. You can add as much plastic as you like, little by little.
The woodburning tool acts like a soldering iron, and the melted plastic hardens so you are essentially welding the pieces back together.
Specifically, I used a plastic Schwan’s ice cream bucket, which is white, to weld my decoy, but you can paint it brown if you like. The deer don’t seem to notice my decoy’s white ankle.
I suppose you could use a plastic milk jug or other plastic containers to do your welding, so you might want to experiment.
This technique should be an easy fix-it method for many other types of projects where you need to reattach something.
— Photo Courtesy Roger Hanneman