OK Yea I wouldn’t use 303 on a zipper.
The point of the Gore warranty is to protect against defects in the material (fabric). They consider delamination to be a defect and it doesn’t matter how old the garment is. Kokatat’s warranty adds the additional element of defects in workmanship. I think the “lifetime of the garment” bit is a pretty sketchy, as it’s completely arbitrary and IMO, that’s not a lifetime warranty. For that reason, I wouldn’t accept Kokatat’s rejection of any delaminated Gore-Tex garment that was not otherwise damaged; I would go directly to Gore because I know exactly what their warranty means and I know from experience that they stand behind Gore-Tex 100%.
When a company makes a garment out of Gortex the manufacturer has to make the garment and submit it to Gortex for approval before they can sell it.
I wonder about instances where the customer CAUSED the delamination.
I say that because I have been guilty of doing so. Even though I should have known better, since I was working in the outdoor gear biz when Gore-tex hit the market in the 1970’s and had received specific training on how it should be cared for (information I had transmitted to thousands of customers) I still did something stupid.
I had an international orange hooded Gore-tex shell that I used for all kinds of activities, including as rain gear on the construction sites where I was a project manager. This meant it often got quite dirty so I laundered it often, always by hand or on machine gentle cycle with Woolite or baby shampoo. Never any problems for the 10 or 12 years I had it.
Then it got really cruddy including some bike chain grease on the sleeves. So I sprayed the entire jacket with one of those pre-wash stain-release products before putting it in the washer. When I went to remove it after the wash cycles, I found to my horror that enormous areas of the white inner membrane had sloughed off the orange nylon in shreds! The jacket was ruined and I had to pitch it. Though it wasn’t a great financial loss (bought it at great mark-down at EMS – apparently nobody liked that eye-blinding orange) and I got over a decade of use out of it, it was one of the most useful rain shells I ever owned and I still miss it – had an oversized hood and long tail for bicycling so it fit over my hard hat nicely. I don’t even remember the brand (might have been Class 5 – many of the early Gore-Tex shell makers are gone now).
Apparently whatever solvent was in the spray had destroyed the bond adhesive between the laminates. Gore’s own advice page for dry-cleaning companies warns about this, but I don’t know if the average owner of a Gore-Tex garment is aware of the danger of pre-spotting solvents.
You can’t expect a company to pay for misuse of their product although I am sure they do many times.
I certainly would not have expected compensation for my own stupidity. But I wonder if they do get cases where people have used solvent stain releases on a more limited basis.
I am sure they have seen everything by now