You can save hundreds—if not thousands—of dollars on technical outdoor gear if you master just one simple aspect of gear maintenance: zipper care. Even just doing the bare minimum to maintain your zippers can add five or more years of life to backpacks, fancy Gore-Tex jackets, and pricey tents. And the longer you can go without having to replace these things, the more cash you’ll have in your pocket for more important things—like gas money, plane tickets, and breakfast burritos.
Over the years, I’ve interviewed hundreds of gear experts for this column, and zippers have come up dozens of times—particularly when speaking with repair specialists—as the most important individual detail on the pieces of gear they live on. It makes sense: Zippers are a major point of weakness on most gear, and they can break easily if they’re not used correctly. Repairing them is difficult to do at home and expensive to outsource. If an ember flies onto my rain jacket and burns a hole in the shoulder, I can repair it in minutes with some Tenacious Tape and/or one of my beloved Noso Patches. If I break a zipper, I usually…
