Hot knife welding as preparation for easy tent seam sewing
Hot knife welding is a simple preparation for easy seam sewing for DIY backpacking tents.
I have a more detailed post on hot knife cutting and welding for tent making, but the welding function may get lost in all the other details. Consequently, I thought a short dedicated post would be valuable to describe and focus on the welding function of the hot knife as it relates to the easy preparation of tent Mock Felled Seam (sic Lay Flat Seams) for backpacking tents.
Hot welder cutters, are we are spoilt with choices?
For far too many years I have used scissors to cut fabric to make my pyramid tents. “I put off getting a hot knife for far too long.” There are so many similar hot knife cutters available online. Many are designed for use with 110V so my choice was more limited because I needed a 240V model with an Australian standard plug. There are so many blades to choose from. I chose the KS Eagle Hot Cutter with the ‘arc-style’ blade. The blade shown has proven to be very versatile and as is my usual wont, I have modified it a little to make the blade blunter.
Hot knife welding while cutting instead of pinning
I was delighted with the easy cutting function of the hot knife. That is described in the ‘longer post‘. While using the hot knife for cutting, I discovered to my delight that if two or more pieces of fabric (many synthetic fabrics) were laid on top of one another and cut together (or finely trimmed), they would end up neatly welded together. I immediately recognised that such welding made the fabric layers behave as one piece of fabric when starting to sew Mock Felled Seams (or similar). Furthermore, if a fabric with a bias cut edge was to be sewn to a straight grain edge it made this otherwise difficult sewing easy.
“No pins, no bias grain stretching, creeping and easing of the unwanted length. Just the easiest Mock Felled Seam that a crap sewer could sew. Just one little difference between the seam done this way is that it has an extra layer of straight grain within the rolled seam and this just makes it a little stronger and plumper. “
Tie out tab tack hot welding while hot cutting
I have developed a method of integrating tie out tabs into my tent seams before the sewing is commenced. I did this initially by RTV silicone rubber glueing while I also glue tacked the seam (instead of pinning or hot welding). When using the hot welder to cut and weld the fabric edges together, the tie out tabs can also be tack welded in place in readiness for simple sewing them into the seam during the sewing of the two lines of seam stitches.
This was to be a short post, so I will let the photos below wet your interest.
You may like to look at the detailed post to see many more uses for hot welding cutting.
Tim