How did I not know this about Zippers?

I am a DIY kind of guy--always looking for a simple solution I can manage at home, rather than paying someone to fix things. And I've sewn my own tents, including the zippers on one of them.

But over the years i've also recognized that some things are better left to professionals. We've used a Henry Shires Rainshadow 3 tent for many years now, and many, many nights of camping. Finally, on our last trip, the zipper began to fail.

We own two!

It still zipped along the track, but the two sides of the tent often remained separated. Nuts. replacing a zipper is a lot of work, and even replacing the slide (yes, I've done that, too!) is work.

But I also remembered that when I called Henry about hole in our tent (a falling ember from a nearby slash fire I was working on) he was able to get me a quick repair kit to fix it perfectly. I thought he was worth an email.

He wrote back within a couple of hours on Labor Day Monday. That's customer service. And he sent me a link to a video that he created to show how you might fix a zipper that was doing just what out zipper was doing.

I followed the directions, and twenty minutes later, our zipper was good as new.

Amazing. Henry Shires, that is. Me? I'm just figuring stuff out, slowly. Very slowly.

Here's the link to the video: https://www.tarptent.com/zipper-repair/