Latex, rubber, neoprene (23)

I know that neoprene is a closed cell foam, and it is more flexible than plastazote foam, very similar to evazote foam which I believe is used in the padding part of body armour for rally cross type motor bike activities. (like, there is usually a hard shell of armour with maybe a centimeter or less of evazote. It has great properties as a material. 1 - evazote and possibly neoprene can be gently heated and molded to a shape which may thin out the bubbles and change the strength of the material since it gets thinner in places that are stretched. 2 - you can warm it up and pattern the surface, or glue fabrics onto the surface, don't see why you couldn't cover neoprene with pvc (a stretchy thinner PVC)

Certainly - the strength of neoprene is in the quality of the backing materials used on either side.

I agree that we usually see neoprene as a foam, as in wetsuits, laptop protectors etc. However it's clear from both wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoprene and the manufacturers http://www.dupontelastomers.com/products/neopren... that it can come in different forms. Whether the stuff that's advertised as "100% natural neoprene" (logically impossible) is actually neoprene or not is another question.

Latex is the whitish sap of the rubber tree. When tapped, it solidifies almost at once into solid rubber, with a sort of amber to semi-transparent colour. If you've ever used Copydex glue, it behaves very much like natural latex. It comes out of the tube a white liquid, but soon solidifies on contact with your finger into a rubbery solid.

The solid latex is sometimes used as is - for instance as "crepe" rubber soles of cheap shoes. But it's not very stable and tend to melt easily in hot weather. So:-

Latex is mixed with sulphur and heated to vulcanise it. The resulting product in sheet form or moulded form is usually referred to as "rubber" to distinguish it from the raw latex. Rubber is really just vulcanised (i.e., stabilised) latex.

Almost all fetish clothing is all made from this material -whatever it's called in their literature or websites. The makers sometimes use the word latex to emphasise that the material is natural in origin and not synthetic, as many fetishists (myself included) regard synthetic rubber as inferior.

Garments and other things can be moulded during the vulcanisation process. This is the only form of natural rubber that most of us are likely to come into contact with. The variation occurs because vulcanisation gives rise to widely variable materials depending on factors like amoutn of sulphur, temperature etc.

Then there are synthetic rubbers. These compounds are sythesised to have a similar chemical composition as vulcanised rubber (rather than latex) in order to avoid any further processing. There is a family of them that are roughly similar in texture to rubber but to my mind not quite so tactile. Neoprene is one such family.

Another similar family is Polyurethane which is universally used these days to make "rubber" riding boots.

There is more than one way to skin a cat but there is only one try per cat