Your Marine Sanitation Device Specialists Share Ideas On How to Best Repair Your Canvas Fasteners
Raritan Engineering your marine sanitation device suppliers would like to share with you this week some great information regarding how to fix canvas fasteners.
Sooner or later, chafe, UV rays, and sharp edges take their toll on our boat’s canvas. A misplaced screw or simple friction will eat holes in a dodger. A seam gives up, a line rubs through the fabric, and a few snaps come loose.
Older fabric may be too sun-rotted to allow the weak spot another row of stitches will create, and the stitching may leak.
In the upcoming September 2017 issue of Practical Sailor, tester Drew Frye, who also blogs at his website Sail Delmarva, compares a variety of tapes, glues, and adhesives for making these types of repairs.
Snaps are the first failure point on many covers and dodgers. Often the stress cause by repeated shrinking and stretching during wet/dry cycles works them loose.
Your Marine Sanitation Device Distributors Continue to Give Ideas on How to Keep Canvas Fasteners in Great Condition
Your marine sanitation device experts talk about how to remove the old snap, disturbing as little cloth as possible.
• Bring the edges together on the reverse side with masking tape.
• Cut a 2-inch square patch (round the corners) and slather it up with a 1/16-inch coating of polyurethane adhesive sealant (3M 5200 works well, and other options are discussed in the September test report).
• Patch the reverse side if the cloth damage is severe.
• Allow to cure. Varies with the products, but for polyurethane it is typically 3-5 days in warm humid weather, 10 days in cool, dry weather. We’ve had good luck with 3M 5200, but other polyurethane adhesive sealants did well in our test.
• Punch and install hardware as usual. Relocate the fittings if the failure was due to the canvas shrinking.
This is one time where the increased stiffness helps, better distributing the force over all of the fabric layers. We’ve never had a repeat failure.
The same process can be used to repair other types of canvas fasteners.
Russian tanker sails through Arctic without icebreaker for first time
A Russian tanker has traveled through the northern sea route in record speed and without an icebreaker escort for the first time, highlighting how climate change is opening up the high Arctic.
The tanker was built to take advantage of the diminishing Arctic sea ice and deliver gas from a new $27m facility on the Yamal Peninsula, the biggest Arctic LNG project so far which has been championed by the Russian president, Vladimir Putin.
Environmentalists have expressed concern over the risks of increased ship traffic in the pristine Arctic but Sovcomflot stressed the tanker’s green credentials. As well as using conventional fuel, the Christophe de Margerie can be powered by the LNG it is transporting, reducing its sulfur oxide emissions by 90% and nitrous oxide emissions by 80% when powered this way.
In the route’s busiest year so far, 2013, there were only 15 international crossings but the Russian government predicts that cargo along this route will grow tenfold by 2020. This link with the Pacific reduces its need to sell gas through pipelines to Europe.
Simon Boxall, an oceanographer at the University of Southampton, said that shipping companies were making a “safe bet” in building ships in anticipation that the northern sea route will open up. “Even if we stopped greenhouse emissions tomorrow, the acceleration in the loss of Arctic ice is unlikely to be reversed,” he said.
The extent of Arctic ice fell to a new wintertime low in March this year after freakishly high temperatures in the polar regions, and hit its second lowest summer extent last September.
Don’t forget these helpful reminders on how to repair your canvas fasteners. 1) Remove the old snap, disturbing as little cloth as possible; 2) bring the edges together on the reverse side with masking tape; and 3) patch the reverse side if the cloth damage is severe.
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via Quick and Dirty Repairs to Canvas Fasteners
via Russian tanker sails through Arctic without icebreaker for first time