Bushwalk Australia

If I punch a hole in 500D nylon. Just a small hole maybe 50mm in diameter.

Is that hole likely to widen and eventually split open?

Is there anything I can do to mitigate that? (Without a sewing machine)

Thinking out of the box.. if I heat up a metal food skewer and melt a hole would that keep the hole from splitting under load?

The nylon is subject to load. Im thinking of creating a drain hole for a water bottle carrier at the bottom. Will hold about a 1 litre of weight.

Holes tend to run if not reinforced. Can you please advise of the colour of the nylon? I have boxes of fabric and can send you a patch. Drain holes are good. The water containers for wine casks I made all have drain holes.

Hand stitching and a bead of silicon works. For a hole that large I'd use a scrap of flywire mesh cut 10mm bigger and stitched all around. If you don't have any around I could mail you a scrap I'm sure I have some left over somewhere. Or some of the basketball mesh

Hi Wildwanderer, You could patch the hole with nylon with silicone rubber as suggested by Moondog55. Please see my post on this.
https://bushwalk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=35134

Or my website post:

https://timtinker.com/silnylon-glueing/

If the nylon is not the type that bonds well, it will still help to hold things together anyway. It will make it easy to do supplementary hand stitching once the silicone cures. A sewing kit can be obtained from a $2 shop and you can keep it in your bushwalking kit.

An example of the hand stitching is shown below:



Even shirt cotton can be glued and sewn on in this way.

https://timtinker.com/silicone-rubber-for-ultralight-backpacking-gear2/

Hope this helps,
Tim

Another way is to make a square patch with a hole, then sew the patch over the bigger hole in the item. Bias tape can be used to go around the edges of the patch hole, or fold the hole edges in and sew. I did this for my wine cask water container and it's lasted for decades.

Thanks all. Great suggestions.