How To Repair Towable Tubes

DIY boating fixes #1 – Repairing PVC towable tubes

If you have a large tube you know they get roughed up with kids and adults bouncing around. Repairing the inner material can be a bugger as they are usually PVC and the oils in the material mean that most glues don't stick - even those designed for inflatables. We had a tear along a plastic welded seam which i figured meant the tube was dead as no patch sticks there including the one that came with the inflatable. The tube itself was a 3 man Coleman Hydrofusion that cost enough that I wasn't going to give up without a fight.

I spent a few hours searching online and found a number of useful products (the hardcore rafting people, get tears all the time and have to fix them so were a good source of information). The problem was that so many of the products are easily sourced in the US but not available locally or weren't widely available where I could just drive and pick them up (side note – don't you hate that in the US everything small is free postage whereas in Oz, the postage for a small envelope can often be twice the value of the goods! - thanks AusPost).

It was clear that the more times you tried a partial solution that didnt work, the harder it would be to get the proper fix to adhere, so I gave up on the little tubes offered at sports stores and concentrated on the professional or well reviewed stuff only. I settled on 2 products that had lots of positive reviews, one by McNett under their GearAid brand , the other called VLP by Plasti-Dip . Ultimately it cam e down to availability, I could find the GearAid stuff at a variety of outdoor stores but the VLP was only available in Sydney through mail order with expensive postage (see rant against AusPost above) or at store nowhere close to me.

To say the stuff works is an understatement. It seems most of these good ones are a mixture of Urethanes at different viscosities ( I used the shoe repair version as it was available, and I figured it would stay in place better than the runnier versions) and they are fairly forgiving of surface conditions (moisture is needed to help them set). Even those the split was in a difficult location where I couldn't lay the tube flat, I just squeezed in enough to cover above and below the split then extended either side by about 1 cm.

Left overnight it cured and formed a slightly opaque, mostly flexible, but airtight seal. It was put to the test the following weekend where we had 3 kids on the tube both in and out of the water over 3 days of hard use.

The original repair held fine, but another opened up on the opposite seam. Once again, a field repair of it just gobbed on the seam and left overnight, saw play resume the next morning. Truly remarkable stuff. For a perfect repair there are recommended solvents to use 1^st, but they probably have more use with inflatable boats rather than towable toys.

Tips are:

clean the threads of the tube when finished so you can open it next time,
put the unused part in the freezer to prevent the solvents drying out
use a flat stick to spread it (not your fingers)

Available for around $16-18

CrewWithMe

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#coleman #mcnett #diy tips #towable #boat toy #ski tube