I make my own nylon pants and shorts of the 3 oz/sqyd supplex sold at http://www.therainshed.com. This is the lightest supplex I could find which has a soft finish. Instead of making zip-off pants, I made separate shorts and pants using the same pattern except with shorter legs for the short. Both shorts and pants have elastic waist and no pockets. I wear the shorts all day and sleep in them at night, and I pull on the long pants over the shorts as needed. Much simpler and more reliable than those zip-off pants. The shorts weigh 120 grams (4.2oz) and the long pants weight 180 grams (6.3oz). I’m 5’11’ tall, 165 lbs, 34″ waist, so my height is a natural men’s large, but my smaller waist means I sometimes drop to a men’s medium for pants.
I have been wearing the same short and long pants since about this time last year, and this past hiking season I walked in this same pair of shorts. Given that I walked for about 180 days and averaged at least 10 miles per walking day, and that I average at least 3 miles per day in town, I would estimate that I have put at least 2340 miles on the shorts. The long pants have seen less usage since I often wore just the shorts this past summer. I should note that I normally wash the pants and shorts in the sink every few days using shampoo or other liquid soap and then either let them air dry or just put them right back on in the summer, since everything except the elastic dries almost instantly. I do NOT wring my supplex clothing, since I think wringing is very damaging to clothing.
(BTW here’s a question. Does anyone have experience with the difference between the non-roll nylon elastic versus the polyester elastic sold at owfinc.com? I used 3/4″ non-roll nylon elastic in my pants and shorts and it works fine, except it tends to dry slowly and I was wondering if the polyester elastic would be an acceptable alternative. I am VERY concerned about durability since I don’t want to make repairs on the road.)
So far the pants and shorts are holding up with absolutely no problems, other than the hem seam coming undone because I neglected to double stitch there. I triple stitched the load bearing seams (crotch and inseams) and these have shown no problems. There is no other signs of wear between the legs of the shorts. In fact, I reached down just now as I am writing this and pulled on the crotch seams with all my strength–they are rock solid.
Bottom line, supplex nylon is very durable PROVIDED you can avoid direct sunlight. You see, I also made a supplex nylon shirt, of a heavier supplex from seattlefabrics.com and it shredded the day I returned from my 7 month trip and yanked on the shirt to see how strong it still was. (I anticipated the shirt would wear out and brought a spare.) The problem was all the high-altitude sun during the Pyrenees and Alps during June through August. Nylon is known to deteriorate rapidly when exposed to UV sunlight, unless protected with some sort of coating. This same shirt is essentially indestructible when brand new, at least for someone with my arm strength. The pants and shorts, naturally, were not exposed to nearly as much sunlight as the shirt, though I did bring a spare pair of shorts just in case.
I should note that I used Ray Jardine polyester thread for the pants and shorts. For the shirt, I used Gutermann polyester thread because Ray Jardine thread only comes in black and white and my shirt was medium grey.
A final note. My biggest problem while traveling is all the stinks that can accumulate in gear, since I seldom have access to a washing machine and often don’t even have access to a sink during the summer. Wearing clothes made of pure nylon is definitely the way to go if you want to keep stink down. I can wear my supplex short, pants and shirt for weeks at a time, without washing in soap, and the only smells are as follows:
(a) The shorts will pick up a small amount of urine smell after a week or so, from inevitable dribbles that occur after urinating, but I have to put my nose close to the shorts to detect this. The urine smell can be easily removed by rinsing the shorts in cold water, such as a mountain stream. By contrast, long ago I wore some polyester briefs that were specially designed for traveling and they stank so horribly after two days without washing that I felt like a homeless person. The urine smell in those polyester briefs could only be removed with detergent, hot water and a washing machine.
(b) I normally wash my rear after defecating (using water from my bottles–please, people, don’t wash up in streams!), but obviously if I didn’t do this, then the shorts would pick up sh*t smell. Again, that smell rinses away in cold water.
(b) I deliberately made the underarm area very loose on the shirt to avoid smells there. However, the pack straps cause the shirt to be pressed against my underarms and so the shirt will pick up smells there. It takes at least a week for the smell to become a problem, and this is only in the summer, since I don’t normally sweat when it is cool. These underarm smells require soap and either hot or cold water for full removal, though rinsing in a cold mountain stream certainly reduces the smell.
(c) the grease from the back of my neck will eventually soak into the shirt collar and smell rancid. Again, this smell can only be detected at close range. This smell can only be removed with soap and either cold or hot water (obviously, hot is better). It takes over a week for the grease smell to become a problem.
Bottom line, pure supplex is both extremely durable (other than where exposed to sunlight) and very easy to keep clean. My recommendation for long-term travelers who want a reliable, high-performance and low-mainteance clothing system, for temperatures mostly above freezing, is to use supplex nylon as the base layer (shorts, pants, shirt), with high-loft Polarguard insulated vest and/ pullover (Patagonia Micropuff series, or the Cocoon series on this website) as insulation on top of the supplex base-layer, with some sort of rain gear as an outermost layer. If you will be exposed to intense sunlight, then don’t expect the shirt to last a full year.
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By the way, the technical reason for why nylon is stink resistant and polyester is not is that nylon absorbs about 5% water by weight while polyester absorbs only about 1%. Cotton absorbs about 10%, and wool and rayon about 15% by weight. Since cotton and wool are much weaker than nylon, garments made of those fabrics are much heavier than those made of nylon for comparable garments, and hence the amount of water absorbed is not just 2 or 3 times that of nylon but perhaps 4 or more times as much. Similar reasoning in the other direction applies to polyester–since nylon can be thinner than polyester for comparable garment strength, the nylon garment will only absorbs perhaps 3 times as much water as the polyester garment, rather than 5 times as much, as the pure absorbtion % by weight figure would indicate. All these percentages are from memory and might be wrong.
Fabrics that can absorb water, such as nylon, cotton, rayon or wool, are also known to be able to absorb stinks, though I’m not exactly sure of the chemical mechanism for this. I do know the mechanism by which such fabrics are easily cleaned. Namely, the soap and water can easily get into the fabric fibers and wash the dirt and stink away. With polyester and polypropylene, by contrast, the water and soap can’t easily get into the fibers. The only way to wash polyester and polypropylene effectively is therefore to use hot water and agitate the fabric very intensely as with a washing machine.
