How To Choose A Quality Wetsuit .

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Divers Ready, the channel out there that aims to make you a better scuba diver with every video that we put out. My name's James, and welcome to this, the next in our series of videos that we call Quick Tips, where I take the topic within scuba diving, normally equipment-based, to be honest, they tend to be, and I try and cram as much of my knowledge about that topic into a video five minutes or less. This week, as you may have already guessed from what's hanging up behind me, I'm going to be talking about wetsuit construction. And more specifically, I'm going to give you the biggest tip I can, having sold thousands of wetsuits in my career, for when you go to buy your next wetsuit, what you should be looking for for value for money. So that's coming up at the end of this video. I'm going to head over to the workbench over there and break down the different ways that wetsuits are manufactured and what you should be looking for at each sort of price level within the wetsuit categories. If you haven't done so already, and if you feel like doing me a favor in return, just click that little subscribe button down there and hit the bell icon, and that way you'll be notified every time we drop a new video. And that helps us to grow this channel without costing you anything. Right, that's enough. Let's go to the workbench, bye. The biggest tip I can give you in regards to wetsuit construction, right off the bat, the start of this video is, it's not always about the thickness of the suit. And people tend to zone in on that and think, okay, well, a three mil and a five mil and a seven mil, and pick the thickness of the neoprene. And as a general rule, yes, absolutely, the thickness will add to the warmth. But in terms of the construction of a wetsuit, the thickness isn't the determining factor in how warm a suit will be. It's actually the seams and how the different parts of the wetsuit are joined together in manufacturing. Why do I say that the seams are the most important aspect of wetsuit construction that you should be looking at when you go to buy your next suit? Well, let me give you this analogy. I want you to imagine that you're driving in your car and it's cold out, freezing cold, and you've got the heater blasting and you're all snug as a bug as you drive along. And then you crack open a window and all that hot air starts bleeding out of your car and your heater has to work overtime to try and maintain the temperature inside the car. But obviously it's gonna be fighting a losing battle. Well, that's pretty much what's happening when you have a wetsuit with lower end seams. Your body is heating up the water in the neoprene pieces, but because the seams aren't waterproof or water-retentive, basically you've just got water flowing in and out in the same way that the hot air will be leaching out of the car and cold air coming in. So you really wanna pay attention to that. So what I've done is I've taken three suits that I have here in the dive locker, a lower end budget suit, mid-range suit, and a high-end suit. They're all turned inside out right now because this isn't about different brands. This is not a sponsored video. And what I wanna do is show you a closeup and talk you through the main methods that manufacturers use to join two pieces of neoprene together. Let's start then by looking at the most economical suit out of the three. This is a three mil shorty. I'll tell you that it retails for under $100. And it's indicative of the type of suit that you would find in a rental fleet at a commercial dive center. So if you're going to a tropical destination and you're renting a suit, this would be the kind of suit you'd get. You'll also find them branded with the actual dive centers logos and all that kind of stuff. You look at the stitching here, which they've conveniently made blue so I can show it nice and clear. And it's very obviously a stitched suit. There's no gluing involved. And I can tell you that this type of stitching is called a flat lock stitch. It's very easy to do. It's very easy to manufacture because you just run the two pieces of neoprene through a sewing machine. And the particular thing about this stitch and the reason they use it for wetsuits is each loop of the stitch is chain linked to the loop in front of it and behind it, which makes it incredibly strong and durable. Ergo, this suit is perfect for the rental fleet because they're going to get a ton of abuse. Very, very strong. The downside of this suit is all these loops on both sides, everywhere there's a stitch, there's a pin prick, there's a hole. So as you can see, the amount of seams on here, this whole suit is basically a sieve and there's going to be a lot of water flowing through all these seams and it's not going to keep you incredibly warm. It's just meant to take the edge off in tropical water. If you're doing like one or two dives a day, perfectly fine. If you were doing four dives a day for multiple days at a time, like for example, on a liveaboard, I wouldn't recommend a flat locked stitched suit. Let's look at the medium quality suit. This is also a three mil suit. It costs between 100 and $200. And you can see it's also flat lock stitched. So if I turn the cuff of the ankle here inside out, you can see stitching that goes all the way through it. But you're getting some additional features. So at the stress points, for example, the crotch or the knee here, you can actually see that there are dots of tape to reinforce those joints, particularly where the suit is going to be stressed. So that's a good thing to look for. In the armpit of the suit, you've got, again, taping to reinforce that seam, but you've still got that flat lock stitched at that price bracket, which means you're still going to be getting water flowing through the seams. Not great, again. If we move to the upper end of the wetsuit spectrum, you're going to see a whole bunch of different joining techniques on the same suit. So the first thing I want to draw your attention to is the fact that the seams on this suit are taped. In other words, they've used an elastopolymer tape, stretched it out and glued it over the seams of the suit to hold the two pieces together. This makes the seam absolutely waterproof. There is no water flowing through the seam of this suit as long as that tape stays in place. So you take two pieces of neoprene, you glue them together on the side, and then you glue tape over the top and it completely seals the seam. It's not as strong as stitching, but it is incredibly warm. If we take a closer look at the ankle cuff of this suit, you're going to see that there's a join right here and the tape stops here. There's no tape over the top, there's no stitching. There is a tiny little bit of stitching at the end there at the stress point. But if we turn the suit the right side out, I can introduce you to a new kind of join, which is called a welded seam. Welded seams work in the same fashion as a taped seam, but they run on the outside of a wetsuit seam for added sealing and durability. And the beauty of a welded seam is its ability to provide maximum stretch, but with a non-stitch design. So you're not perforating and spoiling the thermodynamic properties of the suit by making tons of holes in, but you're allowing the suit to stay nice and stretchy. This also gives the neoprene a clean, low-profile look. In some cases, seam welding will be used to reinforce a blind stitch on the exterior of the suit, or in this case, taped seams on the exterior. If I turn it all the way inside out, you'll see that that welding continues past where the tape runs in that direction. And welded seams work in basically the same way as a taped seam, except instead of being a piece of elastic tape, it's actually a bonding agent applied as a liquid glue. So here we have three suits that are all the same thickness, they're all three mil, and yet I can tell you 100% for certain that this suit is gonna be the warmest because it has the taped and welded seams that are watertight. They're not gonna allow water to flow in and out of the suit and keep you a lot snugger than the suits that have flat-lock stitch seams. Now, I said that there are three methods of joining two pieces of neoprene together, and that is basically true, as far as it goes for suits intended for scuba diving. But there is actually a fourth method, which is called glued and blind-stitched, where you actually glue the two pieces together and then use a thinner, lighter stitch which doesn't penetrate all the way through the neoprene. So you don't have those penetration holes, you're not turning the seams of your suit into a sieve, but you've got the additional strength from the glue. And this has a couple of benefits. It increases the elasticity of the seam, and whilst it's not as strong as like a flat-lock stitch that you'd find in a rental market suit, it does increase the amount of lateral movement that two pieces of suit can perform without actually ripping the seam apart. Those seams are typically used in surfing wetsuits. You'll see brands like Billabong, O'Neill, and so on, they're gonna use the glued and blind-stitched technique because their suits have to be a lot more flexible than a diver's suit. However, I did actually find an example of some glued and blind-stitching in the higher-end suit, just here around the patch that covers the zipper. And the way you can tell if it's glued and blind-stitched is because, well, sometimes you can see actual glue residue on the seam, but also if you have a look on both sides of the seam, you'll notice that the stitching doesn't go all the way through to the other side, so you only can see the stitches on one side of the seam. So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen, that breaks down the different ways that two pieces of neoprene are joined to form a seam when building a wetsuit. My biggest piece of advice for you guys when you're going out there to buy your next wetsuit is just don't be dazzled by the jargon and the scientific words that they throw out there. Have a look at the construction. Armed with the knowledge in this video, my hope is that you guys go out there and actually look at how the wetsuit is made and have an understanding of what that means in terms of your warmth. And you'll understand that it doesn't really matter what the logo is on the chest of the wetsuit. It's really about the construction. So have a look at the price versus the amount of sealing that you're getting on the seam itself, because that's going to tell you how warm the suit is actually going to be. Everything else is just marketing noise. Really focus on taped seams, sealed seams, and then look at that versus your budget. And buy the best suit that you can afford. I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you got knowledge from it. If you did, please give it the old thumbs up, like button just down there, somewhere it really helps us out to keep making these videos. And don't forget to subscribe to our channel if you haven't done so already and hit that little bell icon. I'd love to hear in the comment section below, did you get value out of the last wetsuit that you purchased? Or if you're looking for a wetsuit, what features are you most concerned about? Until next time, ladies and gentlemen, my name's James. This was your Diver's Ready quick tips video for this week. As always, as always, dive safe, dive often.