The zip/zipper on my favourite jacket (a black, Ben Sherman Harrington-type) suddenly failed me disastrously earlier this week just when I needed it - on a very wet day in County Donegal.
The problem is that when I pull up the slide, the teeth initially engage but then after a certain length (and it’s different every time I try it) the teeth stop engaging.
There does not appear to be anything obviously amiss: there are no teeth missing or anything like that.
Is this something that can be fixed? Or is it banjaxed entirely, beyond repair? If it is the latter, I might as well just get a new jacket as it would probably be cheaper than getting a new zip put in.
Any suggestions would be gratefully received, as the internet has so far proved fruitless.
The fix is a zipper replacement. Fixing individual teeth is almost impossible.
Check with a dry cleaner that does alterations, or a tailor’s shop. Replacing jacket zippers is a very common job and there’s a pretty good chance they already have a set price they can quote over the phone.
I’ve never heard of Ben Sherman before, so after some poking around, I see that it’s apparently a windbreaker sort of style. I suspect you’re right that a new zip would cost nearly as much as a new jacket - around here, jacket main zipper replacement costs around $35-50. Pocket zippers, oddly enough, tend to cost more due to the absurd amount of labor needed to disassemble the jacket to get at the pockets.
Ta - I suspected as much.
But if there are any zip experts out there - someone who works for YKK, perhaps - it would be nice to know how a zip can suddenly go so wrong with no apparent damage.
I had that happen a while back with a fleece vest. I sprayed a little bit of silicone spray lubricant onto the slider and the teeth and worked the zipper for a bit (had to use a pair of pliers on the zipper pull it got jammed so hard) and after a few minutes it became unstuck and has worked just fine ever since.
So don’t write it off. You can fiddle with it pretty vigorously and unless you actually tear the fabric of the garment, the worst thing that you can do is jam the zipper (which is where you are now) requiring a replacement zipper from someone handy at sewing.
They just wear out gradually until the day comes that the wear is too great for the thing to stay together.
If you had no other hobbies, you could measure the teeth regularly and be able to predict failure. But in real life, they just go zipping along until BOOM!
Actually, a lot of the time, the teeth are fine, but it’s the zipper tape (the fabric strip the teeth are attached to) that fails. If the tape stretches, (it shouldn’t stretch at all) the teeth can move farther apart and pop open.
In either case, it’s a gradual progressive failure that manifests itself as a catastrophic failure as monitoring of zipper tooth/tape failure is not feasible.
This was the first return on a google of “zipper repair” so you may have seen it. I recall having been successful in repairing a zipper by replacing the slider, but I am damned if I remember how I did it.