On the inside, you may recognize this construction from clothing. It is commonly used on sweatshirt and T-shirt seams. Some water may seep in through these seams. Flatstitch or flatlock is recommended for warm water too, 62 degrees F and up. You can recognize this seam from the outside; this stitch looks like railroad tracks. The interior and exterior seams look about the same. The interior seam construction is flat and is more comfortable against the body than the overlock stitch.
Some water may seep in through these seams too. Blindstitch is recommended for colder water. This construction is best for colder water because the seams are glued and then stitched to help prevent seepage. This seam construction looks similar to the flat stitch but is narrower. The seams are glued and bonded together and then stitched in such a way that the thread and needle holes penetrate only the top area of the surface.
Some seams are only stitched on one side. Very little water if any will seep through these seams. Blindstitched with seam taping Fluid Seal is recommended for extremely cold water, usually 50 degrees F and below. The seam construction is the same as above except that the inner seams are reinforced or covered with tape.
Before you concern yourself with what size wetsuits will fit you best, you need to figure out what type of material and what thickness you need. There are many different kinds of material available, though nearly all are a variant of neoprene. Most wetsuit manufacturers will use similar materials, though they may have different names for them.
The materials have changed drastically over the last several years. Wetsuit materials have become more flexible, warmer, and more durable as technology continues to improve. The best materials are usually found in suits featuring blindstitch construction. Wetsuit materials come in different thicknesses, measured in millimeters. Kayaking T-Shirt - Blue. Lomo Survival Bag - Orange. Call us on My Cart Items: items Value:.
View Cart Checkout. Lifeguard Supplies, Rescue Cans, Floats etc. Wetsuits help to keep you warm by working in several different ways. But firstly lets dispel a common myth by making it clear that it's not the water that enters a wetsuit that keeps you warm. Indeed a wetsuit would be warmer if no water entered it at all, but then it would be a drysuit; an entirely different piece of equipment..
A wetsuit should be a tight fitting garment which should be gently squeezing you all over. When you enter the water a very thin layer of water will squeeze between the wetsuit and your skin.
If the wetsuit is baggy then a whole lot of water will flood in to fill the gaps between the wetsuit and your body. In both of the previous situations the cold water entering your body will have an instant cooling effect on your body. Now lets take the first scenario; the tight fitting wetsuit: Here the thin layer of cold water that has squeezed into the suit is warmed up by your body heat. Because there's not a lot of water it doesn't take long to warm up and doesn't rob your body of a huge amount of heat.
When you move about in the water, fresh water from outside is largely prevented from entering the suit as the suit is already 'full'. Having a good fit at the ankles, wrists and neck of the suit will help this resistance to fresh water entry, or 'flushing' as it is known.
In the second scenario, that of a baggy wetsuit, much more water will be inside the suit to begin with. Your body will take much longer to warm it up and the process will rob your body of much more heat. In fact your body may never be able to warm the water up significantly. When you are immersed in water and start to move around fresh water from outside easily flushes through the suit and displaces or dilutes the water that your body worked so hard to warm up.
This constant flushing of cold water will make it impossible to maintain much body heat and will reduce the effectiveness of the wetsuit hugely.
So the first thing about wetsuits to understand is that a tight fitting wetsuit is critical to staying warm and a baggy wetsuit is unlikely to keep you warm. In fact it is fair to say that a well fitted thin wetsuit will probably be warmer than a baggy thick wetsuit.. So now we have a well fitted wetsuit and your body has warmed up the water that is in it.
Both your body and the thin film of water around it are pressed hard up against a thin layer of neoprene. On the other side of the neoprene is icy cold water. As this happens it cools down, and you in turn cool down. So there is constant heat loss through the material if the water outside is cold. This is where thickness comes into play. Thicker neoprene will lose less heat through it that thin neoprene so in simple terms a 5mm wetsuit will be warmer than a 3mm wetsuit of the same fit as less heat is lost through the material as your warmth is better insulated from the outer cold..
If you have ever felt the warmth of the sun on an otherwise cold day you'll know what radiant heat is. It is heat in the form of infra red energy. The sun emits it, the bars on an electric fire emit it , even light bulbs emit it.. Space blankets handed out at race events etc claim to reflect this radiant body heat back towards your body and thus keep you warm.
Some wetsuits have a titanium lining, which is a silvery material with a degree of reflecting ability. We have seen allsorts of claims about what this material does. Some manufacturers claim that the titanium lining can reflect cold! A claim that would change the laws of physics as cold in itself does not exist; cold is merely the absence of heat and you cant reflect something that doesn't exist. Many wetsuit diagrams will show the body's heat being reflected back towards itself by this material and the graphics certainly look impressive.
However in our tests, the benefits of having a titanium lining for the purposes of reflecting the body's heat back towards itself are negligible. Firstly the titanium is not an efficient reflector. Secondly it is normally placed behind the nylon lining of the wetsuit thus blocking its ability to reflect anything. Thirdly, when your body's radiant heat hits the back interior of the wetsuit, it heats it up as black is a poor reflector.
Thus the heat emitting from your body is not all lost, some of it heats up the inner surface of the wetsuit when then touches your body. Thus without a reflector some of this heat is retained anyway. Finally, not a lot of the total amount of body heat loss in these conditions is through radiant heat and a very little of this is recoverable through titanium reflection. On materials that are not coated with nylon on the inside, the titanium lining can make for quit a comfortable finish next to the skin and offer it the best chance to reflect some of the heat back but not many products have this.
So to sum up our opinion on titanium lining, it doesn't do any harm, but the benefits of it are totally over hyped by many manufacturers from a heat reflection standpoint. We wouldn't advise someone to make it a significant part of their buying criteria as we have not found any sizeable thermal benefit from incorporating it in our suits..
We have talked about flushing and about trying to keep the water out at the ankles, wrists and neck. But water can also come in at other places. Seams and zips are next to come under the spotlight. A small amount of water will seep through many types of stitching and through the seams where the material comes together. This is not a flood of water and for some types of suit this is acceptable.
Summer 3mm wetsuits for example have flatlock stitching that allows such a slow seepage. However, for a summer wetsuit this is perfectly acceptable. The suit is more than efficient enough, even with a small amount of seepage, to keep the user warm in cool summer waters. In winter conditions we need to try a bit harder to keep every last bit of heat inside the suit so we try to stop water seepage at the seams in several ways.
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