Hi Rod,
Just goes to show, people need to have a chair mat or the carpet will come apart easily. Heavy rolling traffic will certainly delaminate a carpet as seen here. They did their own Phillips Roll Chair Testing and it failed.
I cannot tell how far this goes, I know what you said but it is hard to really tell what is going on by a photo, a lot of this type of work is done by working with what you have. Having said all of that, if I understand correctly, the seams are still together(?), I assume this means on the secondary backing they are still holding in place? I would tend to want to take this apart and see if there is enough room to fold the carpet back enough so that the entire damaged area can be exposed and worked with. If this is possible, simply adhere the backings together with some form of wet set adhesive, or contact or spray adhesive, whatever you are comfortable working with, (bubble glue will also work if you trowel it as well). I then like to apply another backing material to this for added strength and glue it in place, a lot of the adhesive will work it way through the secondary and this added backing will help to hold it. Then if you can get it together, see what will be needed to work your seams, you may have to trim this to get a good match or if you have little to work with, you can manipulate the seams together and as John said, use of DS Kool
GLide tape works very nicely here with proper seam sealing with the Koolglide Adhesive.
You will need a powerstretcher or mini stretcher to work this.
You can also use hot melt with a t-tip applicator and put this together but you have to be able to smooth it out carefully or you could have some hard spots that ones will notice from the hot melt. The advantage of the hot melt would be you could assure them it would hold together much better than before, if they do not use a chair mat after the repair. You will also need to have some wood to work on so you will have a nice flat surface
(video here is only to show using work boards to place under ths carpet)
THe advantage of hot melt is the time factor and strength factor. Carpet should never be folded for more than 4 hours or damage can occurr. That is also why a second backing over the original secondary helps a lot, if this is a closed backing, you can fold the carpet back over and let it set without damaging it by leaving it folded for too long.
Here is a partial clip of this type of repair with use of hot melt, you will have to look closely and quickly but you can see it has been relaminated and then manipulated with a powerstretcher. Even though this is at a metal transition, the principle would be the same except you would be putting the seam back together.
Either way, with wet adhesive or hot melt this should be a repairable situation. I tend to like the hot melt unless it is really large, then I will opt for the wet adhesive and add a closed pore backing ( something like monks cloth). With the added backing I can lay it back flat and put flat boards, (the portable flooring I use works great), and then weight them and let them set up. Then work the seam. If you use hot melt you will need a t-tip to be able to 'iron' it out smooth but this is fairly quick and sets us well and if you need an added backing a piece of action bac will work very well.
Sorry if this is so long, I was trying to give you some options and help to explain it. If you are not sure of anything I said, let me know and I will try to cover that area again.
I am on the road right now so I never know what time I will be able to respnd, if you need me to.
SA
