Fixing Plastic Pants!

[rusty pins]

Like probably a lot of people, I have plastic pants that eventually get rips and tears, usually around the leg elastics or waist elastics. Some of my favorite plastic pants, the VIP "Soft And Silents" are no longer made and I have a few with rips. I also have about 9 pairs of thin Priva plastic pants I got from Miles Kimball. They are prone to getting tares after a while.

A DL friend of mine and I were talking about tares in plastic pants a few years ago when out in the boat fishing, and wondering if we could find a good way to fix them other than usinge tape over the tares. Well, I think I finally found a way!

I've slept in a waterbed for the past 25 years and now and then I would get a small hole in the mattress. Yeah, a hole in a waterbed matterss in the middle of the night feels just like you wet the bed, only colder! I keep a small repair kit on hand for instant repairs, although over the years I've had to order a new mattress twice due to not being able to fix the small hole.

Anyway, getting back to the plastic pants. I had a few small tares around the legs of one pair I was wearing and I had some others with tares as well, one pair so bad they couldn't be fixed. I suddenly rememberd my waterbed repair kit and dug it out. Quick drying glue made especially for putting a vinyl patch on the mattress! BINGO! I used the badly ripped pair of plastic pants as a "doner" pair and cut patches from them. I made sure to cut them large enough to compleatly cover the tare and wrap around the elastics so it would be glued on both the inside and outside of the pants. This worked fantastic! It takes the glue maybe 5 minutes to dry to the point the patch will not move, 15 minutes to dry to the point you can use the pants and the instructions say over night to compleatly set up. I fixed 4 pairs so far and not a problem anywhere! I even used some of the glue to reinforce the side seams on a couple pairs to prevent them from possible future tares in those areas.

If any of you have the same problem and are wondering how to fix vinyl pants that have some tares, get a waterbed mattress repair kit, or just the glue and try it. I think the thing that makes this work so well is the formulation of the glue. It's designed to dry quickly and be used on vinyl. After all, when you have 100 gallons of water in a mattress and it gets a leak, you need something that will patch it very quickly and hold up under the pressure of someone's weight laying on that mattress! Other glues just won't hold as well as waterbed mattress glue.

[pvc_pants]

a swimming pool repair kit works well too...

[Bettypooh]

That sounds like ideal glues for a repair like this I haven't found a good way to do repairs beside elastics though due to the expansion and contraction there Small rips here get a one-time fix using clear packing tape which holds up OK till it gets really wet Sewing can fix a side-seam but it won't be waterproof like that alone, however there's little wetness there 'cept with cloth diapers or while side-sleeping

I loved the fit, feel, and function of Priva;s for work-wear back when I used cheap store-brand leaky pull-ups but they didn't hold up well. Several times they gave out on me while at work, but never in a way that leaked enough to be a big issue On doing the math I discovered that Depends pull-ups, which didn't wick wetness so badly that they needed a diaper cover, would cost essentially the same so that's what I use now

The biggest problem I have found is that plastic hardens and becomes brittle with age an when that happens repairs don't last or another rip occurs next to the repair My solution is to stay ahead of the game and when a decent-quality pair of plastic panties begins to show age or an imminent problems I will get more ASAP, reserving the old ones for in-home use where leakage is not only a non-issue but is actually something I enjoy discovering There's nothing like seeing an unexpected wet spot on my pants in the mirror when I'm alone to reaffirm my love of being in diapers

Bettypooh