I remember a while ago I was talking to Gene and Jon about my plans to construct a wetsuit or two. I thought I'd let you all know that I've finally got around to it, after to doing a lot of research, getting the right neoprene, tools, and so forth. I'm just finishing up the first one, and so far so good. My goal for the first suit was to make one the was 6ml, smooth skin, and almost the same size as an existing suit I have. After looking for a sourse of good neoprene, I found that Elios does sell some material to who ever wants to buy it. The tricky part was trying to make a pattern from an existing suit, to make a long story short, I made a lot of attempts and was almost ready to give up. I finally settled on tracing a pattern on heavy clear plastic sheeting over the inside seams of my old wetsuit where I highligted the seams using white out. The pattern worked great, after cutting the neoprene with a heavy duty scissors, the gluing was probably the easiest, but messiest part of the job. With it all said and done, I would guess that I've got a smooth skin suit that cost about a third of what a similar Elios would cost. The real test will be during the ice dive coming up in earlier Febraury or while shooting carp at the outlet in Madison. Hopefully by the ice dive in Feb I'll have another suit completed. I would guess the time spent in making the fist suit has been about 16 hours (not including making the pattern), a bit longer than I thought but i like a good challange.
Later,
Brian
Later,
Brian