FixnZip to the Rescue

Alright, so if you camp a lot, I'm sure you have had this problem at some point in your life. You pull out the ol' trusty tent, set it up, go to zip open the tent entrance and the zipper messes up. $%#^%@$% So there you are, with a tent that is 100% good EXCEPT for the zipper, which is pretty vitale. You know what you have to do most of the time? Trash it and buy a new one.

This same scenario just happened to my wife and me. We had traveled to the Alabama Mountain Games recently and once we got our Coleman Instant Tent set up, we realized that the zipper was broken. Not only were we looking at having to buy a new $100+ tent, we had to sleep in the freezing cold with a tent that wouldn't shut. Very inconvenient...

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In a last ditch effort before I threw away the tent, I decided to do some research online to see if there were any fixes. What I found was the FixnZip. It looked pretty promising but it sounded too good to be true. Seems like I would have heard of this before. I decided to give it a shot and got on the phone with them to get some samples ordered. Here is a little of the info I heard about the FixnZip after contacting them:

"The product is zinc dye-cast, and is nickel plated. It's also manufactured, assembled, and packaged entirely in the US. It comes in 2 colors: nickel and graphite. There's no difference between the two, other than the color. You'll notice that the FixnZip has a thumbscrew on it. That's what makes it adjustable, and allows it to fit on a range of sizes, styles and materials. So you can use the same FixnZip on a 5 nylon coil, and then take it off and put it on a 7 plastic tooth. It even works on invisible zippers, but you have to turn it upside down (if that doesn't make sense, we have videos explaining it).

The Medium is our most common seller, since it fits most sleeping bags, tents, jackets, and backpacks. Occasionally you have a zipper on of those items that needs a large. The large works great on wetsuits. We have a number of dive shops that use the Large for their in house zipper repairs."

Sounds great right? Maybe too great... So with a little bit of a cynical view, I set up up the tent in the backyard and decided to give it a try. Not going to lie, the first couple of attempts didn't go so well. The thing is that if this were a jacket or something, it would take like two seconds to fix. With a closed-end zipper like on a tent, it is a bit harder to get started. That being said, I sat down and watched the helpful video that I included below and gave it another shot.

I loosened the thumbscrew, slide each side of the zipper track into the sides of the FixnZip, pinched the tracks together while tightening the thumbscrew and voila, fixed. I mean seriously, fixed like new. This product is quite honestly a miracle worker. It is literally the difference between throwing away an expensive and perfectly good product to having it like new again.

I can't thank FixnZip enough for coming up with such a great product and letting us here at WeStroke try it. This little product has personaly saved me over $100 and made it possible to camp in our tent again. Even if you don't currently have a need for one at the moment, you should have some around the house, in your gear bag, etc for emergencies. Check them out for yourselves at FixnZip.com.