Equipment failures and how you fixed it

Have you had equipment failure on a trip and how did you handle it? Did you have a repair kit or did you have to improvise? What did you learn? Here are a few of mine.

Failure: hole in down, feathers flying!
Fix: duct tape
Lesson learned: do not wander through stickery brush in a down jacket

Failure: pack strap broke
Fix: lots of parachute cord and lots of knots
Lesson learned: check pack straps before the trip!

Various clothing failures: broken zipper, rip in pants, button lost
Fix: sewed up jacket so that it became an anorak, moleskin works amazingly well for holes in pants, sewed on button
Lesson learned: ALWAYS carry needle and thread, a spare button, a few safety pins

Failure: tent leak at ridgeline
Fix: regularly sponge up water
Lesson learned: should have seam sealed the ridge line, bring a small tube of seam seal

Failure: blew up a SnoPeak stove, probably cross threaded cannister when I put it on- gas leaked out
Fix: none, thankfully with a group so shared their stove
Lesson learned: blowing up a stove is not cool. Luckily none of us got hit by the shrapnal. I am now very careful when I screw on the cannister to the stove.

Failure: flat Therma-rest
Fix; put up with it
Lesson learned: Do not tie thermarest on back of pack when bushwhaking. I also now take a short section of blue pad wtih me as back up.

Well i dont have near the time in the backcountry as you WD. I did have a failure 3 years ago. Lost zipper stop on bottom of my thirty year old Snow lion Bag. Result was zipper popped open at night. Thought I would freeze. Next morning I was able to line zipper back up ,and sew shut at bottom to replace stop. It got me threw the rest of the trip! Good thing too cause final night droped to 17 degrees and high winds. I was in leconte shelter. With all my clothes on I stayed comfy! I always have a needle and thread in first aid bag.

I've had quite a few, some similar to the above:

Broken zippers (clothing, tent screen door)--same fix as Kent.

Stitching started to unravel where top of new pack sewn to extension collar--survived the trip and Ron Moak of Six Moon Designs fixed at no charge. He didn't just resew where the stitching was loose but sewed twice all the way around the pack to reinforce it!

I shortened the excess hip belt straps on said pack to save weight, but like an idiot didn't fold over and hem the ends of the straps. At the trailhead for a trip last summer, I found that half of the belt buckle had fallen off. Temporary remedy: Removed the other half of the belt buckle and tied belt ends in a square knot. It worked for the trip. Permanent remedy: bought a new buckle and hemmed the strap ends!

Netting of tent door tore loose from zipper; easily sewed back on. I discovered that a small pebble can be used as a thimble substitute, as it was hard to get the needle through the zipper tape.

Another one from last summer: the seat of my pants completely disintegrated (pants were 10 years old, so not surprising). It wasn't a case of a hole to patch but of the whole seat in shreds! Remedy--tied my wind shirt around my waist and let the tail hang down to hide most of the rather large gap. All the people we met on the way out politely did not mention my ragged state. Fortunately I had jeans in the car to wear on the drive home! (My grandson, who was with me, would never have let me drive back without stopping at the first pizza place we encountered!)

Tent leak, like W_D's, due to gap in seam sealing of new tent. Had tiny tube of sealer with me. Prevention: after seam sealing, test tent with garden hose! Do this at the beginning of each season, or at the end when you are cleaning tent for winter storage anyway.

Now the biggest repair I ever experienced, although my father did most of it (I was 12 at the time): It was the 4th day of a 6-week horsepacking trip. We were in northern Colorado, on what the map showed was a trail but obviously had not been cleared for at least 10 years. We came to a log across the trail, which was low enough for the horses to walk over. However, the lead pack horse decided to jump. The second pack horse decided no way and pulled back. The lead rope connecting the two horses broke, and second pack horse took off down the trail at a dead run, bucking and smashing his pack into trees as he went. Pieces of the pack were strewn along the back trail for several miles. The wooden panels of the antique cowhide panniers broke in several places and so did the wooden pack saddle. Fortunately, there was a nearby abandoned homestead, with quantities of the standard Western repair material, baling wire (this was in pre duct tape days). My dad drilled holes (with the leather punch on his pocket knife and a hot wire) and ran baling wire through them to hold together the wooden panels of the panniers, the pack saddle tree and the broken leather straps (except where the strap would rub against the horse, where he used leather lacing). He heated the baling wire slightly so it would shrink tighter when it cooled. The repairs held up for several years! In the meantime, my mother and I hiked the several miles of trail picking up the pack contents (mostly food and cooking gear). There was a lot of it! The very last thing we found, in dense foliage behind a tree, was my father's checkbook! (This was long before the days of debit/credit cards, so the checkbook was our only source of extra cash.) We of course had to lay over a day to accomplish these repairs. Interestingly, the horse was evidently scared into behaving himself ever after--we never had any more problems with him! When we left, we abandoned the trail and followed the road! I'm not too sure how this would work today, given the rarity of baling wire and that duct tape, its modern equivalent, wouldn't have done the job.

This is a good thread topic! My addition will be the thermarest patch kits. Obviously they are good for patching your Therma-rest (at least I hope so; never used it for that), but the epoxy glue is good for fixing hiking boots. Many of the newer boots have moulded bottoms with different types of rubber glued together. I have seen these come apart quite a few times, and I have put them back together with the epoxy in the patch kit. The epoxy is good for putting quite a few things back together and I always bring the kit now.

Another; forget or break your tent stakes? Take your pocket knife out and make a set and/or use rocks.

I always bring needle and thread, couple of buttons, and safety pins.

Great topic!

Broken zipper on tent door. Sewed and safety-pinned that door shut, then used the door on the other side for the rest of the trip.

My wife's pack tore open at the bottom. The problem was that there wasn't quite enough material in the seam. We re-sewed it with dental floss...and it has now carried us hundreds of miles,

Water filter plugged. Yeah--this one was on a spring hike with very high, muddy water. And we didn't have a backup filter. We melted snow in our pots and bottles by putting them in a black bag and leaving that in the sun.

Scariest of all: Almost ran out of matches! We each thought the other had packed them...and we ended up with ten matches for five days. And we made every single one of them count!

Tears in clothing, and external mesh ripped on pack and seams coming open and/or tears in pack fabric --- fixed all of these with a sewing needle and dental floss as 'thread'.

Duct tape fixes cuben fabric well; less so other stuff, though I've also fixed a pack fabric seam split this way (not at a weight-bearing spot ...). For actual stuff that happens, duct tape is useful but I think a bit over-hyped. You know the old chestnuts, such as "just need duct tape and WD-40: if it moves and it shouldn't duct tape it, if it should move and doesn't, use WD-40". Dental floss and a needle has proven more useful to me than duct tape.

Shoe fabric uppers wearing out, big holes. Solution? Nothing, I've not found a good on-trail solution apart from just living with it until the shoes can be replaced.

Trekking pole broken: find a useful stick until can replace. Titanium trekking pole bent: bend it back!

Gaiter cord that goes under shoe wears through and breaks: stop using such cords. In fact, I kept one cord on, but stopped putting it under my shoe; it made it quick and easy to tell the left gaiter from the right one.

Gatorade or pop bottle type of water bottle gets mold in it: buy a new drink at the store.

Windshirt got a hole in it; temporary repair with duct tape, longer term repair at home using seam sealer.

Aluminum caldera cone bends out of shape and won't stay closed; paper clips. Then later took some time to re-bend the tongue-and-groove.

The usual patch kit for inflatable mattresses. I find that I can get by with about half of the repair kit that comes standard. In-the-field identification of the leak can be relatively easy or hard, and in fact, sometimes with all the time in the world at home it can be hard to find a slow leak. Patching usually works, though I've had one case (an inflatable pillow) where it just never worked well enough.

Tent leak at ridegeline --- I had one of these too, right at a spot where some elastic was sewn in, only showed up under pretty hard and sustained rain. I found that once the tent was even a little wet on the outside (and I could wet it myself in advance if desired), I could 'stick' a black yardwaste bag outside the tent to cover the spot. Might not have worked in high winds, but it served me a few times.

I find that, even with relatively lightweight gear, stuff really lasts quite well if reasonable care is taken. I.e., I find that clothing/equipment 'failure' is very very rare, and generally a little common sense and flexibility will suffice to deal with it.

I take a glue stick like used in a hot melt glue gun. It can be melted with a BIC. I fixed a shoe which had the sole coming loose and it lasted for another three days. One time I had the zipper on the fly of my pants break on Isle Royale where there were a lot of people around. I did not have anything with me to repair it so I found the guy with the biggest pack and he had an extra twenty or thirty safety pins. I started carrying a simple repair kit after that.

My left boot sole delaminated and was flapping like a big piece of bologna on a cross country hike, luckily on the next to last day. We tried gluing it that evening with about 3 thermarest repair kit glue tubes (everyone's in our group who had one), which held it together for a little while the next day but it failed after a couple of hours, at which point the bear-hang rope we'd wrapped around the forefoot many times kept it walkable. I kept worrying I'd have to walk out in my socks but it never came to that.

I've seen this work well and I've seen it fail quickly, with the significant difference, I believe, in the tread amount and type on the shoe (no one I know hikes in boots, but I assume it's the same thing).

I.e., if you can wrap reasonably tough cord such that it goes inside fairly deep tread so that it's rarely being actually stepped on, you might be able to do quite a number of miles that way. If not, then ... not.

I suspect that the cord we carry plus duct tape are the modern equivalent of baling wire!

Duct tape worked for me in a similar situation. That is the modern equivalent of baling "war." BW would probably work.

"Lesson learned: blowing up a stove is not cool." - Wandering Daisy

mwhahahahahahahaha!

Actually, the cord was being walked on, not being entirely shielded by the tread; I think what made it work was that rather than just wrapping the cord around in circles, we criss-crossed it from both directions, hooked it on the lace hooks at a few points, back around the heel, etc., which kept it from just sliding off the toe end.

Come to think of it, the fact that it was a boot rather than a low-cut shoe probably made all that wrapping possible.

My own experience is that you can go a scant number of miles that way, but not a lot. The problem that comes when you get a shoe blowout of that sort is that, Murphy's law being in effect, you're probably 50 miles away from your next planned trail exit.

Duct tape, at least the one time I tried it, lasted significantly less than a day before becoming inadvertent trail litter. Just in general, I find duct tape to be useless for dealing with footwear issues (gaiter repair might be an exception, haven't encountered the need personally).

Shoe failure on a long trip is a possibility. I actually buy new shoes quite often. I take neither new shoes nor old shoes on longer trips. You never know if your new shoe is a lemon- manufacturing flaws usually show up quickly. One trip my hiking partner's shoe sole was coming apart. We were in an area where horsepackers frequent, so we searched many sites and found some wire. He wrapped the wire around his shoe and it lasted the rest of the trip! In the old days when we used boots, we would take boot nails with us. New boots are now just glued and I am not sure a boot nail would work on light hikers. BrianLee is right. Once a shoe starts for fail, you have limited miles left.