**Landing gear and knee wing are used interchangeably in this post but refer to same part of pad**
Hi I'm new to the board, the whole reason I stumbled across it was trying to fix the nylon landing gear on my V1 pads.
The nylon became very 'fuzzy' over time and trapped the snow making sliding very difficult. I tried a variety of sprays, wax, and even a razor to shave off the fuzz to no avail. I read a couple of posts where people had glued vinyl or leather to the knee, although somewhat dubious to the durability of this method it was the easiest to try.
My parents had a couple of huge rolls of vinyl in their basement so I decided to put it to good use. First I traced the outside of the landing gear and cut out the vinyl, then I trimmed it so it would fit directly on the landing gear with no overlap.
I then used a fabric glue being careful to spread it right to the edges of the vinyl. I clamped the vinyl to the knee sandwiching it between some wood pieces for 24 hours.
This lasted almost a full game but near the end of the third I looked like I had bat wings as the vinyl was flapping off the knees.
I decided a better way would be to sew pockets that I could slip over the knee wing and attach to the pad. I took the original cutouts and re-traced them larger adding enough excess material for stitching and wrapping around the width. On one side (the piece that would be against the knee stacks) I added a couple of extra inches so I could tie into the knee stacks to secure the new piece. I folded the extra inches on the inside piece over and stiched it so it would look nicer and so that the tie in was double thickness. The pocket looked like this.
After trying it on the pad the fit was really nice, I had a large eyelet set from some previous repairs. (This can be bought at Wal-mart, Zellers, etc.. for a couple of bucks)
While the new sleeve was on the pads I marked where the holes should go to tie into the existing knee stacks. Using an industrial hole punch I made the holes and installed the eyelets.
Here's what it looked like tied in.
I've had them on the ice and it works great, any changes would probably be for appearances such as scalloping the edge to follow the inner knee roll of the pad which you can see above.