Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Zippers: Easy to operate, impossible to repair

By Carl Heintze

I've spent a lot of time in the last few days looking at zippers. Zippers, like safety pins, are things you wish you had invented. They are so simple, so universal and so valuable, you wonder what we did before they were devised. They have all but replaced buttons on trousers, and they are the way most jackets are closed or opened.

It was a jacket zipper that led to my interest and frustration. The main zipper on the jacket was broken and wouldn't close. Obviously, the jacket wasn't worth much without a zipper. Therefore, it seemed I ought to fix it rather than throw the jacket into the dispose-of-clothes bag at the back of the closet.

Fixing a zipper looked easy enough. Zippers have only one moving part, the slide as it is called, that moves up and down the two opposing rows of fasteners forcing them together so that their teeth grip one another.

So, all I had to do was replace the broken slide, right? Well, not quite. First, I had to get the old slide off. This required resorting to a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. I used the pliers to hold the slide tightly. Then I pried up the side of the slide.

Pretty soon it came off. First part of the job done. The next problem was to apply a new slide. One would think that since slides often break they would be a lot of them around in stores as replacements.

There are, but almost of them are fastened to complete zippers. In other words, what the zipper makers would have us do is tear out both sides of the old zipper and sew in a new one.

Well, I am not handy with a needle and thread or with a sewing machine so I quickly discarded this plan. But it occurred to me that I ought to be able to find an old zipper on some other piece of clothing, pry its slide off and then squeeze it back into place. I located an even older jacket and after some work got the slide off a pocket.

Then I tried putting it back in place on the newer jacket. What happened next is what happened to two more slides when I tried to squeeze them back in place on the jacket. They broke neatly into two pieces. Yet another fiendish scheme on the part of the zipper makers.

After looking at the jacket for a few more hours and then sleeping on it over night, I repaired to a fabric store and after some hunting I found a slide. It was the only slide available, and it came in only one size. It included directions. It turned out, oddly enough, to be the only slide for broken zippers.

And, of course, it was the wrong size to fit the zipper on the jacket I was trying to repair. I could get it on the zipper track, but it wouldn't force the two sides of the zipper together. It was too big.

But it did teach me one thing. Or rather the directions that came with it did. They pointed out that you can slide a slide on the zipper track if you remove the tiny little block at the top of the zipper. There are two of them, one on either side of the zipper opening. It's easy to do. Pry it up with a knife blade, slide the new slide on, put the block back and pry it shut.

So now all I had to do was find the right sized zipper. Which, of course, meant that I had to buy a whole zipper, slide, sides and all, remove the slide, put it on the jacket in question in the way I have just described and, olé, the zipper worked.

I tell you all this to point up a moral I've learned: Lots of things in modern life don't work. As our technological civilization grows ever more technological, more and more things don't work. I mean everyday things don't work. The faucet drips, the TV antenna falls down, the washer overflows, the car won't start, the automatic lawn sprinklers go on at the wrong time or don't go on at all, the automatic garage-door opener opens when it shouldn't. And that's only the beginning.

Sometimes I think of this as a war between us and the machines we have created to supposedly make us more comfortable. And sometimes it seems like the machines are winning. The average householder not only needs to be a mechanic, a plumber and an electrician, he or she also needs to have on hand a stack of manuals to tell him or her how to make the necessary repairs.

I didn't have a zipper manual. I'm not even sure if there is one. When I asked my wife, who is an excellent seamstress, how I should go about the repair of the zipper, she just smiled and said, "Forget it."

That's probably the best advice I've gotten on the zipper problem, but somehow I hate to give up. It just doesn't seem right that the machines, however big or small, should determine our future.

But it sure looks as if they have.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Los Gatos Weekly-Times.