Sunday, April 24, 2016

Semi Drysuit UPGRADE

Last summer I bought a Kokatat Semi Drysuit.  It has the booties and wrist gaskets but on the neck it has a neoprene collar instead of a neck gasket.
 

Instead of spending $1200-$1400 on a full drysuit I decided to try and make an budget friendly drysuit and put and neck seal in the one I have.

First I hunted around to try and find something the right size to fit my neck collar down over and came up with this...
I used a plastic lemonade jug I had found.
I had to put a bit of electrical tape around the top to stop it from sliding up and back off the jug.

I VERY lightly sanded around the edge of the new seal with 220 sandpaper.
Then I took my time and stretched my new neck gasket over the neoprene collar.

After the gasket was on I rolled up the bottom edge to expose the factory seam where the neoprene was joined.

Next I added a decent amount of Aquaseal all the way around the factory seam.

Then I rolled the edge of the gasket back down over the factory seam.  You can see in the middle of the factory collar there is a little rib that runs around it, so after I rolled down my new gasket I added a bungee on the bottom side of that rib just to be sure I get a good seal.

From the looks of things it turned out perfect.


Fun little project and can be done for almost half the price of a full drysuit.
I'm going to be using this on Wednesday night so Ill put it to the test then and update on how it held up.

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