| I'm sure many people that have put either a lot of money or effort into some cloth-based garment which involves a zipper will be familiar with this situation. On said zipper-based article, the zipper breaks. If you've got one of those zippers with individual teeth attached to the cloth, you're pretty much screwed. If however the zipper is like most, in that it's a looping strand of plastic, there may be hope if you don't ignore it for too long! In this case, it was my camera case, upon which I've done a number of modifications to have it work with my geocaching bag. Given the hours of work that's gone into the inside and outside of that camera case, I wasn't about to let a broken zipper force me to start over again with all that. | |
| Why, oh why, do companies produce zippers so cheap? Around curves such as the corners of the camera case, there's a lot more stress and tugging at angles generally not felt by the straight portions. Now, the secret here is that your initial knot for where you secure the start of the thread, keep that as far away from the zipper itself as you can. I had about 3/4 of a centimeter before the zipper edge cloth was sewn onto the rest of the case, so that's plenty of room. Just so long as the zipper head doesn't hit it when zipping across it. I made that mistake on the OTHER corner of this case... which broke and was subsequently fixed in the same way a few years ago. | |
| After painstakingly wrapping thread between every single tooth of the zipper and sewing it into the fabric that it pulled off from, this should pretty much take care of the problem. One might think this wouldn't hold as good as the original manufacturing job, but given the first corner hasn't had another problem in several years, I imagine I won't have to worry about this side for a long time. Sorry about the blurryness, the camera decided to focus a little bit off... but this picture illustrates it well enough. Also, I used blue thread pretty much solely because I couldn't find the black thread :P. | |
| And here it is, zipped closed. The zipper doesn't even hesititate when going over the area, and it doesn't mis-align any teeth, so it's good as new. Or better than new, if you ask me. For the very end of the thread, I once again worked it inside the fabric away from the zipper as far as possible, and knotted it off. All knots are on the inside and thus invisible from the outside, and aside from the blue thread (which I may or may not blacken with a marker, we'll see if I ever bother with that), it looks good as new. As it always seems with me... if you want something made properly, you have to do it yourself. | |
