Dry Suit Repair

[Reddog_747]

I have a few questions for my fellow DIY ppl, but first a short back story of how the questions came about.

I was going over my dry suit the other day to locate a leak in the shoulder/neck area(DUI TLS350). At first i thought it was at the neck seal somewhere, so I began looking for any pinholes or tears with my light in a dark room. Well after much looking i couldn't find anything. I then turned to looking at the seam where the latex seal glues to the dry suit. What i found was about 3/4 of the seal was well glued the other 1/4 was not! The glue used had failed and the only thing keeping water out was the Aquaseal on the inside of the suit overlapping the end of the seal and the dry suit. So moving my finger around gently in one of these failed glue spots the seal just starts pealing up! So i continued in this fashion and pretty soon almost the whole seal was separated from the neck opening. I was able to remove the seal without any damage at all and practically no glue attached to it! All the glue was still adhered to the dry suit and after about 15min of just picking with my fingernails I was able to remove 98% of the glue from the suit as well you can see the results from the pictures below.

Now my questions on this part are...
1) Dose any one think it would be a problem to reuse the neck seal? It seems to be in great shape no holes or signs of deterioration.

2) Has anyone ever had a glue experience like this? Is it just because the glue aged or possibly a bad batch?

After the joys of removing the neck seal i found the actual reason for my damp shoulder. A hole had developed along the edge of the zipper see the two pictures below. From what i can tell the hole was caused from entry and exit of the suit. When the zipper is in the full open position the hole is just where the bottom part of the zipper ends (Bad description I know).

Questions for this part....
1) Has anyone ever had this happen on one of their suits?

2) Do you think that a patch of some Aquaseal will seal this hole and hold? If i have to i can put a good size patch on this and only loose about an 1" or so of zipper travel.

3) Any suggestions on how to fix WITH OUT replacing the whole zipper?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!
(Sorry for lengthy post!)

Pictures
Neck opening after removing glue.


Old neck seal


Old Glue


Zipper outside of suit


Zipper inside of suit

[Hollywood703]

you can re-use the old seal as long as it looks to be usable.....as far as the hole.....what about a patch on the opposite side of the zipper....since it is small a inner tube patch kit would probably work well, just get it atleast 1/4" larger than the hole on all sides.......just make sure you get lots of glue/epoxy on it and that it is well dried before testing it.

[Flatliner]

I don't see a problem with either but I think you will find that getting a good seal on the zipper hole is tough because of the seam.

However, what do you have to loose. If it doesn't work, you have to replace the zipper anyway.

[Reddog_747]

Ok I figured reusing the neck seal would not be a problem as it is in good condition, if anything it will be good practice installing a neck seal! As for the zipper hole I figured that it is going to be quite tricky. The more I look at it i think i am going to end up patching over the hole as well as the seam of the zipper to get the 1/4 of overage. Like i said before i will only loose about an inch of zipper travel but will still be able to get in and out of the suit easily. As flatliner said if it doesn't work i have to replace the zipper anyways. Hopefully it wont have to come to that, so if anyone else has any ideas throw them out there for me!