How to: Patch Heavy Netting

Transcript for the video on how to patch heavy netting.

Today we're going to make a video to help a customer out who called us. He has a hole in a batting cage. We're making this video to show how to patch heavy netting.

Heavy netting gets repaired different than the smaller stuff. #15 and #21 netting, if we are patching the hole, we can simply drop in here, tie around the mesh, and patch the hole up. With heavy netting you can't do that, because if you come in here and tie around the string, you shorten the mesh and it just distorts the net so bad.

So what we're going to do is, a customer has this exact hole in his net right here so we're going to start out with this here. If the hole is bigger, it doesn't change because we're going to show you how to start, how to end, and how to tie the knot in the middle. A bigger hole, you just do more of it, that's all.

The first thing we're going to need to do is, we're going to tie on to the string that is broken. Now this one is already frayed and I don't really have enoug here to tie. We're going to un-tie and go back one mesh. So, we're going to loosen the knot up here and we're going to un-tie this knot. That's going to give us enough to start with. We're also going to have to do the same thing on the inside because again it's too short for me to tie on to here. So we're going to prep the other side by un-tying this mesh.

You're saying we're making the hole bigger and we are. But we're making the hole bigger to make the repair look much better.

At this point, we're ready to start our repair. So what we're wanting to do, is we want to tie a square knot where we're adding our twine on. We're going to tie a square knot in this, and we want this knot to fall in between the existing knot and the one that we're going to make to patch this up. It's very important to make sure it comes out right. We're going to pull this very tight. Because this large twine is very prone to coming undone, what we're going to do is we're going to snip these ends and we're going to burn them and try to kind of melt this to the point that it can't come undone. What we're trying to do is to put kind of a flat head on this so that that string can't come back through the knot.

We're going to both sides that way. You want to leave a little bit here so you can melt it but not too much that it makes a big ball there.

Okay, so chances are that knot will not come untied. You can also heat this up just a little, it's nylon, so it can stand a little bit of heat. And that heat will kind of set that knot for you. So now you have a small knot which will be in between the mesh where we're going to tie. At this point we're ready to place what we've taken out. We're tying this from left going right. The rule of thumb always is if you're sewing from left to right, you always pick up the mesh from the back side. If we do that and tie this knot, it will always look like the rest of the netting. We're going to come here, set the distance, which is about the same as the other mesh, come around, and back up through. We're pulling this tight. This is the same knot the machine puts in the net, and you want to make sure you pull it tight. Now we'll go up to the top, come in from behind the mesh, pick it up, set the distance here to be about the right size we're gonna pinch it and instead of tying below, of course we going to tie above. We throw a loop, come around through the loop, pull it tight.

Come behind, set the distance here, tie our knot.

Now, to finish this up, this is the part that is a little more difficult. It's easy to tie the square knot here, when you're not worried about making a certain distance, but here we got to not only tie the square knot, but we want the distance to be right. This just takes practice.

You also want to make sure you tie a square knot, and not what is known as a grannie knot. Look up square knot on Google and learn how to tie a square knot. A square knot will hold, a grannie knot will not. Here again, we're going to pull this nice and tight, work our knot down, then, snip the ends. Burn each end. You gotta be careful here knot to heat the netting close to it, you don't want to burn the other fibers here. You see I'm doing each one of these as I cut it. If I don't, you run the chance of your knot getting loose and that's what you don't want to happen. We can kind of melt the little hairs off, and bingo, there you have it. You can see we didn't get this string exactly the same size, of course this one is a little short so we can actually adjust this just a hair. Pull it good and tight. It looks just like ther rest of the net.

This way you only end up with a knot here, and a knot here, as opposed to if we had fixed this like we would #15 we would drop in here, we would tie around here, try to pull this tight, and you can see how it would distort the mesh very hard. Not only that, it is very hard to make these knots hold.

If you've got any questions, you can always reach us here at the Nets & More (The Fish Net Company LLC). Call 1-800-256-5256 and ask for Lee or Michael, we'll be glad to help you. Thank you.