Fixing a hoodie zipper with a drinking straw and hot glue.

Hack That Broken Zipper!

We’ve all been there. That sad day when the zipper on our favorite hoodie, bag, or pair of pants breaks in some seemingly irreparable way. But there is hope, and [Magic Stitches] is gonna show you how to make some common repairs using household items and, in some cases, just a little bit of easy hand sewing. After a warm up with a kitchen fork, the video moves on to more significant problems.

The first problem — a chewed-away zipper bottom — is quite common, but requires no sewing to fix. As you’ll see in the video below, all it takes is a drinking straw, some hot glue, a lighter, and a pair of scissors to recreate the plastic bit that keeps the zipper from splitting in twain.

Sewing the teeth of a zipper together after cutting the tape just enough to slide the head back on. Now the second issue concerns a pair of pants wherein the head has come off the static side of the zipper. This one seems impossible to fix, but [Magic Stitches] cuts into the static side about five teeth from the bottom, slides the head back on, and sews the bottom of the zipper together.

This one we take a little bit of an issue with, because it assumes that you can get your jeans on over your hips without needing the zipper head to be fully down. But what else are you going to do but throw the jeans away upcycle the jeans into a fanny pack or something to immortalize them?

Continue reading “Hack That Broken Zipper!”

Repairs You Can Print: The Zipper Box

Picture it: winter, a few years ago. [Ted Yapo]’s son is sent to the front lines of a snowball war. He rises to the task, pelting kid after kid with ease and taking down the Johnson twins with a two-fisted trebuchet maneuver. As he hunkers down to form the last snowball needed to claim victory, the unthinkable happens: the zipper box on his coat breaks and falls silently into the snow. Unaware, he leaps to his feet to take his final shot and the whole zipper unfurls, exposing him to both the cold and the enemy. They won the war, but at what cost?

[Ted] figured the coat was done for. He thought about replacing the zipper entirely, but that was going to be a lot of work. He cast a forlorn look around his workshop and his gaze fell upon the 3D printer in the corner. I can rebuild it! He thought. I have the technology! He was off to design a new box in OpenSCAD and had sturdy ABS replacement zipper box in no time. He installed it with dab of Duco cement, and the rest is history. That coat saw two more winters and countless snowball wars before [Private Yapo] presumably grew out of the thing.

Zippers are the unsung heroes of clothing. If you don’t know much about zippers, sink your teeth into [Dan Maloney]’s recent ode to the quickest fastener we’ve got.

3D Printed Zipper Saves The Day!

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[Amr] recently built a 3D printer and came across his first practical application for it — his jacket’s zipper broke!

What we like about this project is [Amr] goes through the entire design process to finished product in his video. He starts by showing us the failed zipper, explaining where and why it failed, and then identifies the design features he needs to keep in order to make a functional replacement. To help accomplish this he checks out the Wikipedia article on zippers which shows an excellent animation of what happens inside of the zipper.

Now confident in his knowledge of all things zipper, he begins to model his replacement using SolidWorks, which is an industry standard among 3D CAD packages — for more information on how to use SolidWorks, we’ve been covering it in our 3D Printering articles! Continue reading “3D Printed Zipper Saves The Day!”