It appears to me, that you could pull the arms of your wetsuit towards your torso more, and yank the torso up to the shoulders more as well.

Under the shoulder in the armpit tends to be the most stretched part of the wetsuit, so it really needs the extra material available to not get over stretched.

That said, I've used aquasphere with excellent results. I had a wetsuit with a hole starting to rip away at a seam underneath my zipper, and putting on a crap tone of that stuff made a flexible fix that was stronger than the original material.

I'd try that, and pull the material into the shoulders more, see how it goes.

I'd expect many more than 15 uses out of a wetsuit, unless it cost me under $100

Thanks for the tip!
You might indeed be correct, it has always felt kinda tight under the shoulder/around armpits while almost too big in other areas. I will try repairing it and paying attention to pulling the arms of the wetsuit on more to see if it just might be salvageable.

Are you using nitrile or latex coated gloves & plastic bags over your hands/wrists/forearms when putting on the suit?

Those tears look like they started as small fingernail tears that have spread.

By using gloves of some sort & plastic bags you can get the arms on and pulled up while greatly reducing the risk of tearing.

Lower end suits tend to use #38 & #39 rubber which is less flexible & pliable which may increase the amount of tugging needed to get the suit in place meaning you may have to take a bit longer to put it on.

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Brian Stover USAT LII
Accelerate3 Coaching
Insta

I had the same wetsuit with exactly the same issue. Twice. I got a replacement from Zone3, but the same tears appeared in the armpit area again after a couple of months of use.
One tip I can give you is when you put on the arms of the wetsuit is to be very careful to not stretch the armpit area by keeping your arms horizontal.
After the second wetsuit was damaged beyond repair I bought a more expensive wetsuit from a different brand and I no longer have this issue.

We have sold dozens of these for the last 3 years and we have also gotten dozens of returns. And at first Zone3 replaced them, but after 2 years it was suddenly the fault of the consumer....
We had so many returns, with bad cs from Zone3 that we just stopped carrying the brand,
Over the years the price went up, quality went down and cs went down.

I like the company but I think they are growing too fast and loose control on quality on some of their products.

But in this case, you are not alone, you can return it but your next one will have the same problem if it comes from the same batch of production.

Take your loss and get a better quality next time.

Jeroen

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Owner at TRIPRO, The Netherlands

Thank you for the comments guys, looks like I am in the market for a new wetsuit.

Hi all! I have recently come on board with the Zone3 team to assist with the US territory. Sorry for any issues that you have had with us in the past with both wetsuits and CS.

If you don't mind, can you please shoot me a note at carter.wehrer@zone3.com and I would love to chat further with you to see how we can help out.

Thanks!

Hi Carter,

I hope you have a good time with the brand. As I stated above, I really like the people and had some very succesfull years with them.
But fir the last few years we just had issues piling ip one after another. We introduced the brand in our country 7 years ago, but due to all the hassle we had to part ways with them last year after another hollow promise.

But I hope they will learn from mistakes made and take the brand up to the next level in quality as in dealer / cs service.

Jeroen

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Owner at TRIPRO, The Netherlands

It's not only the Zone3 Advance, my wife has a Vision and it is also tearing and ripping. Once a month I glue on average 5 rips and cuts. She is very carefull putting it on with socks, gloves and plastic bags, but it doesn't make a diverence.
I've a six year old Aspire and it has only a couple of small rips in al those years. So It's seems (N=2) that the newer and/ or cheaper suits have issues.

True, we had it with the Advance and Vision. Never with the Aspire and Vanquish.

Jeroen

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Owner at TRIPRO, The Netherlands