I recently had a couple zipper pulls^[1] fail on bags I've had for a while. The two bags (one a red Dakine backpack and the other a blue Patagonia duffle) have zipper pulls that appear to be some sort of paracord molded into a little rubber handle. After a few years of use, the little rubber part pulled right off, leaving me with just the relatively small metal pull of the zipper to use.

I decided to replace the zipper pulls on these bags myself, ideally in a way that I could easily replace them again. Based on what I saw with the pulls that failed, I decided to stick with the paracord (that seemed super sturdy) but switch to a metal pull handle rather than the molded plastic pieces the bags had originally.

Components

I got two thicknesses of paracord for this project - 1.18 mm and 1.8 mm - because the two original bags had slightly different cord thicknesses and I wasn't sure what I really needed.

Next, I went to the hardware store looking for good pieces of hardware to use. My original idea was to use brass washers, but I found these nice "cable stops" that seemed great and ended up just using those instead.

The parts I got were 3/32" and 5/32" cable stops made of aluminum:

I'm pretty sure the 3/32" 5/32" dimensions refer to the inner diamater of these parts

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The first repair I made was on this red backpack. Here's the old black cord next some sections of the 1.18 mm and 1.8 mm paracords. I think the original cord was probably in the middle of those two - probably 1.3 mm or 1.4 mm.

I opted to use the thinner paracord here. I figured out what length of cord I needed (mostly by trial and error - I have 100 feet of this cord so there's plenty to work with) and made a loop with a knot that was big enough to not fit through the cable stop's inner diameter. Here's how I looped the paracord and cable stop into metal zipper pull:

And here's the process repeated for the other zipper:

I really like how these came out! I think the orange, red, and silver is a fun color combo and the aluminum cable stops have a really nice feel and weight to them.

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The process was largely the same for the blue bag. Once again, the original cord is somewhere between the 1.18 and 1.8 mm paracords I bought, but in this case I oped to go with 1.8 mm paracord because this zipper is a litte bigger.

Here, I started with a knotted loop bigger than I needed and slid the knot down the loop until the position of the new aluminum pull approximately matched the position of the old rubber pull:

Then, I snipped of the extra cord and melted the ends with a flame to prevent fraying:

I'm also happy with how this looks! The larger cable stop for the larger paracord has a bit more heft to it which feel nice. The larger cable stop is also really easy to grab so opening the bag is as easy as it was with the old zipper.

And here are all my bits of zipper hardware ready for the next repair! I'm almost looking forward to the next time I break a zipper pull!

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1. I think that's what you call the little strings attached to zippers. ↩︎