Marine-grade snaps are commonly used on many cushion and upholstery styles within our family of boats. The purpose of these snaps are to help secure your boat’s cushions while underway or during transport. To work as intended, your boat’s snaps must be fully engaged or “locked” in place. To correctly lock a snap, place the snap-receiver (female) over a snap-bottom (male) and push down, vertically and firmly. When done correctly you’ll hear and audible click and feel the snap’s lock engage.

Safe Removal / Avoiding Damage
In some cases we’ve learned of snap-receivers being ripped away from cushions or snap-bottoms pulled from a fiberglass mount due to excessive force and/or vertical tensions during cushion removal. As such, the following diagram is intended to demonstrate the correct and incorrect manner to remove upholstery  and “unlock” a snap. As you can see, pulling upward and vertically with force is incorrect and may cause the “lock” to tear away from a cushion’s bottom, or rip out mounting screws or both. To help avoid this problem, when removing boat cushions the best practice is to slowly and without force to “roll” a vessel’s cushions away from their locked positions at an angle.

Other Recommendations & Best Practices

1. Regardless of the ability to lock cushions in place, we strongly advise that you stow your vessel’s upholstery within your boat’s console during transport. The reason for this is during transport, your boat may exceed 65+ MPH which can unlock snaps and also damaged snap-receivers and snap-bottoms.
2. As a routine maintenance task, we also strongly advise the use of a marine-grade, snap and zipper lubricant on all of your boat’s snap-receivers and snap-bottoms.