Tyler Newton
Busted gaiter.
The built-in gaiter of Maddy’s right La Sportiva Syborg boot became un-stitched and the zipper broke just before this year’s Elk Mountain Grand Traverse. The repair only took 20 minutes and helped fill the downtime between check-in and race start.
What you need to get the job done:
Using the can opener of a multitool, slightly widened the gap of the Syborg zipper’s slider. Take care, too much of this and you can break the slider as sliders typically are not made with any sort of extra-strong material.
Prep the sewing kit. Pick the yarn that matches the color of the Syborg, this is important with any sort of Italian product repair.
Carefully align the teeth of the zipper so they are even and then pull the zipper back together. Zip the zipper approximately one inch. This was difficult and took three attempts before getting it just right. Add a stitch approximately three teeth from the bottom of the Syborg zipper. The stitch doesn’t show up well in the photograph so a red line highlights placement of the stitch.
Remove extra/excess old stitching from ski touring boot cuff.
Starting at the top of the break, stitch the zipper back to the cuff using the existing holes. Using the existing holes ensures that zipper will function correctly and not jam after repair. This is time consuming but the end result will look better than adding your own holes.
When done, test zipper by zipping up and down once or twice.
Use the needle nose pliers of the multitool to clamp the zipper’s slider to its original position. Use the other boot to gauge how easily the zipper should slide.
How good was the fix? The stitch held and we finished 9th overall and 3rd in coed. (photo: Kat Fitzgerald)
Check out more gear mod posts here.
(Guest blogger Tyler Newton grew up in Carbondale, Colorado. He attended Colorado State University where he fell in love with backcountry skiing. Inspired by the movie “Endless Summer” he spent 3 years in an Endless Winter splitting his time between Aspen/Snowmass and Wanaka, NZ. When he’s not working for PubWorks. he’s the current President of the Aspen Cycling Club and sits on the Snowmass Village Community Outreach Board. As a regular on the skimo scene he’s swallowed the fast and light pill so you’ll often find him in Spandex heading uphill. He’s finished 11 Elk Mountain Grand Traverses, has many top 11 finishes, and is one of the few people to have hiked and skied 11 Highland Bowl laps in a day.)
Shop for La Sportiva ski touring gear here.
5 comments
Fantastic.
Nice job under pressure with forethought to document for Wildsnow followers! I pulled the slider completely off the zipper on the top end when overcoming resistance to close it, a challenging job to fix. You are correct on the light touch needed to widen the slider gap to go back on; I destroyed the slider in my first attempt. Fortunately a touring partner had another one. And a lighter touch. I then put burlier end clamps at the top end to decrease the odds of a repeat performance – perhaps others may consider as a preventive step to zip-off failure. In looking at the successor model Sytron, am I correct in thinking it has a more elastic cuff and has dispensed with the zipper altogether?
Correction: more elastic gaiter rather than cuff.
Robin, I happen to have a pair of Sytron here at my studio, no zipper, just a cuff-gaiter. Lou
Great write up Tyler, and congrats to you and Maddy!
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