I bought 4 more sheets of foam board and 6 more yards of canvas today. It’s making me nervous that there is only 4 weeks left and I’m building something so complicated that has never been built before. Plus the scooter needs work and so does the wagon!!!

Here is the first production zipper with canvas sewn onto each half of the zipper. This is a #10 coiled zipper. We could not get a long #10 toothed zipper fast enough. This coiled zipper is cheaper to make but looks to be strong enough for our uses. At first I ran just one row of stitches to see how strong the seams would be. They had some flex to them in tension. I added an extra row of stitches to each side of the zipper and it really didn’t make the joint any stronger. In fact it makes it a bit harder to unzip the joint due to the canvas being right up against the zipper pull. Zippers sewn into a K-Hing will only have one row of stitches on each side. I folded a 1/2 inch of the canvas under the bottom to make sure the canvas does not come unraveled with use. This also made for a nice looking seam.

Here is the zipper after it was installed and then unzipped to clean up any excess glue that might get into the zipper teeth. The glue set up fast today since it was warm in the garage. I’ll do it at night the next time. The foam weather stripping was added to see if it would compress ok and fill in the joint completely so it would be as heat and dust proof as possible. This weather stripping will probably go between each of the 6 roof sections for best insulation from heat, light and dust. The ends of each canvas joint will need to have the excess material trimmed away after the glue sets.

This is the completed roof and wall assembly with the zipper glued on. Normally the zipper won’t be glued on, but since this assembly was a prototype this is how I decided to make it a useful part of the Yurt so there is no wasted materials. It also showed me how to do a zipper repair in the future if needed. I could simply cut off the old zipper at the threads, and glue this zipper and canvas assembly over the joint. Maybe not as strong as a zipper sewn into a K-Hinge, but should hold up. We’ll find out, that’s for sure!