Prepare To Repair Important Gear

When we’re working inside, we wear what social need and mood dictate. When outside in rough weather, ‘clothing’ becomes ‘important gear’. Good boots and warm, water-shedding outerwear stand between you and injury or hypothermia. Good gear is not that hard to get when Amazon’s delivering; but if not, it can get tricky. That makes getting what you need and keeping it in good repair become very important.

Salty and I talk it over in this podcast:

The car retired long ago, but the same cold gear comes out every winter.

Why repair in our disposable culture?

Two reasons advocate for repairing good outerwear. 

One, good gear comes dear. It’s not designer-expensive if you shop it right (talk to Salty about that, not me); but it does cost more than the cheap stuff. If you are sized outside the most common offerings, it can be tough to find on the rack too. Keeping what you’ve got saves effort and money.

More importantly, just when you need it most is when it’s hardest to replace. That means you have the materials and the skills on hand to repair it.

A case in point

The first snow of the year blew in trouble. My trusty coveralls, having protected me for more than twenty winters, gave up at the zipper. And an eyelet popped off the snow boots that had been with me for more than a decade. With those items, I can (have) hiked through snow and ice and days so cold your spit cracks when it lands. Without them, I have to choose between ‘too bundled to move freely’ and ‘too cold’.

This year, it was an inconvenience. If it had happened when I had to be out and didn’t have the means to repair them? Bump my risk up of frostbite and/or hypothermia up by a considerable percentage.

Look close at the top eyelet and you’ll see it’s held on mostly by hope. Even good gear wears out after a decade or two of hard use.

Repair may need special materials  

Good outdoor gear is harder to repair than a ripped shirt or loose button. One problem is materials. They have to be particularly robust. In an emergency, you could tear up some snazzy but functionally redundant designer coat for a zipper, but that’d last about a week.

We live in a place where a whole lot of people work outdoors in all weathers, so there’s one spot in the county you can buy a really good long zipper for a long coat or coveralls. One. It’s about fifteen miles from us. Our in-town virtuoso seamstress had none on hand.

Big strong zippers went on our To Buy list when this incident showed us they were hard to come by in our town.

Needs differ by situation of course, but I have two inexpensive but potentially invaluable prep ideas for repairing outerwear: Big heavy needles and waxed dental floss.

Dental floss and embroidery needles: Great preps that are also small and inexpensive.

Dental floss is very strong and built to keep that strength when wet. Turns out it survives literally decades of wetting, freezing, thawing, and other abuse when used as thread for heavy-duty sewing. It paired beautifully with an embroidery needle to fix my boots. The eye of embroidery needles is big enough to take dental floss, and the needles are robust enough to shove through leather.

Dental floss guided by an embroidery needle fixed the eyelet problem for the Next decade of use.

A leather repair kit with punches is also a great idea. We’ve got one, but for repair you can often use the original stitching holes, which makes life easier.

Don’t overlook the big strong laces for boots. Paracord doesn’t serve that function as well as you (or at least I) might think.

Repair may need special skills

Do you want a side business that could flourish during even a grid-down situation? How about fixing things that people need and are used to replacing but can no longer buy? If you can sew, repair of outerwear would be a great side business.

The best seamstress in town that takes in job work happens to live across the street from us. She’s the one we turned to when the coveralls failed. Zippers are always tricky, and really long, robust zippers in multi-layered, heavy fabric, insulated clothing? I would probably Eventually have been able to make it work, but Very Much Bad Language would probably have been involved. It’s a high skill job that I was happy to pay for. In worse circumstances, I’d have been happy to barter for it.

Take care of your stuff to reduce the need for repairs

Scotchgard or other water repellents work nicely on outerwear. They reduce the soaking through of the fabric, which both keeps the wearer warmer and extends the life of the fabric.