G'day everyone was out today two hours from home and three hours from civilisation as I'm pomping up found this little tear/worn through spot. I had nothing on me other than some self stick bladder patches so stuck one on each side and hit the water. Has anyone had to do this? Is it worth anything, I mean it lasted but do you reckon the patch added any strength at all or I just lucked out not have had it explode on me. The spot is pretty close to centre and LE (20 cm). Main question: my plan is to get some sticky spinnaker tape and add both sides round patches 50mm and just wait till there is enough other damage to make it worth while to post it away for proper repair, is that what people do?
Aswell thanks for any help and I have to admit as much as I bad mouth the price of North accesories this is the first bit of damage I have had on any of my kites in three years and prob 1-200 self launches on this one.
A small tear in rip stop is not a problem - its called rip stop for a reason !!
So yes you have put bladder repair patches on a canopy - again not an issue ! Id just leave it there and forget about it. If you got really keen you might peel off the bladder patches and install the same size (cut to size ) sticky back - but seriously its not needed - I bet its a struggle to get the bladder patches off unless the canopy was salt incrusted - in which case definitely peel off the sticky back and clean the area with alcohol - then put a fresh patch on !!
Cheers fellas luckily I haven't dealt with this kind of thing before. Thanks for the advice.
Its not as ideal as canopy repair tape but it will do the trick. Type A patch streches easy, so if useing it on a canopy, make sure you have gone atleast 1" around the tear. This is for saftey measure.
Type A can also do a fix faster on the spot, where canopy repair tape needs a cleaner, dryer surface, then a little while to bake in the sun (unless you have a hair dryer) "Good winds to you"
Thanks mate thats good advice, I think I need to bolster up my repair kit so next time I at least have some options.
Tear aid is for bladder repairs only on kites. Yes you can fix tents with it but you won't drown or have to swim in 2 km if it rains and your repair fails on a tent.
It will take more time and consequentially more money to try to remove tear aid from a kite canopy (if you are lucky enough to get it to stick in the first place).
Buy some canopy/Sail repair tape, cut two patches, one larger for the outside and one smaller for the inside surface, the smallest one at least 1 cm larger than the tears largest dimension, Round the edges to help prevent peeling. You want to have the larger one totally overlap the smaller one so you do not have 3 layers finishing at the same point.
Then check it on a regular basis and replace if you see signs of fraying or stretching.
This will get you out of trouble in the short term.
Anything over 2.5 cm needs to be sewn to "fix" the damage, so the next time you get to civilisation they can just do a $5 run over with the sewing machine.
Toddy
Thanks Toddy solid advice as always, done as you said and this is how it ended up (which I'm pretty happy with).
