Why don't manufacturers publish wetsuits buoyancy?

Why don't they?
Standard suits from the shell are the same for particular brand and size. Why not to measure buoyancy of the new suit and publish this?
May be thay do and I just cannot find where?

Not only do they not publish it, but they don't see to know it either. Some time last year I called my wetsuit manufacture and asked about the buoyancy of the suit. The woman I first talked to had no idea, so she went and checked. No one knew. A few days later I got an e-mail from them saying that they do not bother testing this. Silly really. That said, it's pretty easy to figure out if you have some lead and access to a pool (or the ocean, or a lake, etc).

Now this should be good... but I think it’s like asking a woman how much she weighs and getting the correct answer… but seriously ah never mind

You know, I asked a manufacturer (Mares) this very question. They didn't know. I guess it would be a drag for them to test every suit in every size, but how about this...

For each type of neoprene they use, they could cut a swatch of the fabric and throw it on a scale. They know the thickness of the fabric, and can measure the area of the swatch. Armed with this information, we can compute the volume of the swatch. If we know that a given volume of a given fabric has a specific weight, we can weigh an entire wetsuit of the same fabric, calculate its volume, find out the difference between the wetsuit's displacement and an equal volume of water, and viola!
We know how much weight it demands!

Of course, the manufacturer would have to tell us SOMETHING! :14:

one other thing to consider would be the bouyancy that the neoprene looses as it gets compressed by the water:14: and then should the standard method be calculated in fresh water or salt?

I too found that pretty annoying; worse: I tried to get some data on depth vs. loss-of-bouyancy in order to figure out how trim will vary with depth. Does it correspond exactly to Boyle's law or does it level off due to the structural rigidity of the pores. Impossible. No data to be gotten or found. Why does one really have to do everything oneself.

WetFatCat:

Why don't they?
Standard suits from the shell are the same for particular brand and size. Why not to measure buoyancy of the new suit and publish this?
May be thay do and I just cannot find where?

Click to expand...

Maybe something I wrote several years ago will help:

"Data on neoprene foam compressibility seems hard to find, but the following table was derived from some data on insulation loss with depth:

Depth (ft) Reduction in Thickness (Percent)

20 20
40 35
60 50
100 70

My 1/4-inch wetsuit (which fit well when I weighed about 210 pounds) is made up of about 3000 square inches of closed-cell neoprene foam. That’s about 750 cubic inches of foam. It weighs about 9 pounds and would displace about 62.4(750/1728) =27 pounds of fresh water if uncompressed. Hence, on the surface, it’s about 18 pounds light. At 20 feet it would be about (27)(1.0-0.8)-9 = 12.5 pounds light; at 40 feet, about 8.5 pounds light; at 60 feet, about 4.5 pound light; and at 100 feet, about 1 pound heavy.

What about other wet suit sizes? Well, 1/4 inch is about 6.5 millimeters, so a full 3-mil suit for me would be about 46% as light (or heavy) at all depths as my 1/4-inch. Assuming body weight varies as the cube of one’s linear dimensions and surface area as the square, a 1/4-ich wet suit for a 150-pound individual would be about 18(150/210)2/3 = 14.4 pounds light at the surface and for a 100-pound individual, about 11 pounds."