We found a small leak in Heather’s drysuit that I patched up with some Aqua Seal Flex. I think we can get another half dozen years out of these suits if we’re lucky.
Fixing a leak in Heather’s drysuit
Upgrading our drysuits with SI Tech wrist and neck seals
After Heather’s neck seal started leaking more and my wrist seals started leaking a little, we decided it was time to upgrade our drysuits. But rather than get all new drysuits, we instead upgraded the seals. In my case I went from neoprene seals (which I really loved for the last decade) and in Heather’s case she went from fixed latex seals to SI Tech SLÄGGÖ Flex Ring wrist systems and ORUST Neck Systems. That allows us to field change seals if they tear. We went with silicone seals as the new setups on our drysuits.
I also replaced the zippers on my drysuit and redid the seams while I was at it.
Hopefully this will give us several more years of use out of these drysuits before it’s time to hang them up for good and get new drysuits. The crushed neoprene drysuits we have really handle the conditions in Monterey and further north quite well but it’s getting hard to find that style of suit anymore.
It turns out Nalgene bottles are almost the perfect size to work with the wrist seal system for installation.
Working on my drysuit. It requires cutting away quite a bit of neoprene to fit the ring onto the suit. That can be a bit nerve-wracking.
Doing Heather’s drysuit. The little clips are somewhat easy to break on the neck ring. It’s a good idea to get some spares to have handy because it can take a while to get new ones. I had to order those in from a seller in Estonia.
Doing both zippers on my suit. While the relief zipper was still in good shape, the back zipper was pretty much toast. I probably could have had it survive another 50 dives but it felt like this was a good time to do everything.
Re-sealing all the seams in my drysuit. I tried using the seam tape but it didn’t work very well with the suit material. I ended up using auqa seal flex to reinforce everything. Should be good to go now for a few more years.
Working on drysuit seals
Heather’s wrist seals have been giving her trouble so I decided it’s time to replace them. I went with an SI Tech system that promises to make it much easier to swap seals out as needed.
It turns out liter Nalgene bottles are the perfect size to do this work.