Air mattress

Air mattresses are where I had my start. Well okay, maybe a tiny swan, but nothing else seemed to move under me like a mattress in the water. Triggered by a memory of my childhood play date bobbing around on one, my collection has grown.

Lovely left on a hot pool deck to warm!

[balloonPatcher]

Yes, I enjoy the inflatable ladies too!

[Tookus]

My all time favorite Intex, very supple vinyl, and big 75x35 inches. She's fun in the water or the bedroom

[Tookus]

My 1974 Kmart air mattress, feels like it has a rubber/vinyl blend, very nice

[heaviest]

This week I watched two women use air mattresses as chaise lounge cushions. The heaviest of them was only perhaps 220 pounds, so no danger of popping and not very exciting, but after a time she scooted forward so her boyfriend could sit behind her. He was maybe 250 pounds. Still not enough to pop it, but getting interesting, and I like to see adults overload pool toys without a concern for popping them.

[meidolooner]

Back in childhood I dreamed of an air mat but I was too shy to ask for one.

Nowadays I have a couple, including a 2009 Intex Color Mat. I really haven't had that much experience with the older, softer inflatables back in childhood so I was wondering how those feel. I found this mat brand new in an inflatables store a year ago and it was sold for retail price. It certainly does feel softer, I am lucky to have been able to buy it.

Recently I've been to that shop and they currently have a whole shelf worth of old Intex Color Mats, this time from 2011. I wonder if those are still the soft ones because then I'd buy a few.

[lilolover82]

Rule of thumb the older the vinyl inflatable the softer. It has to do with them banning a lot of the phalphates (chemicals) that made them softer and squishy and soft. Also less likely to leak.

[heaviest]

Popped an 18-pocket intex suntanner last night.

I put 950 pounds of sand bags and weight plates on the feet end of it, which left enough room below the pillow end for 205-pound girl to sit, and I sat my nearly 600 pounds on her. It's her kink. On an inflatable we both get a charge out of doing this. We put a piece of foam under her knees to keep her legs from bending backwards. We've also put her legs through a swim ring while doing this, but there was no room for that with the weight stack next to us.

Hard to say exactly how much weight we had on the mattress because we couldn't get our feet off the ground all together, but it was close to 1700 pounds. We've had this much weight on it before, with four people. I was hoping we'd break the inner support veins under the uninflated pillow, as nobody was on that end of the float so it was allowed to bulge ridiculously.

It was hard to keep her butt from bottoming out. She sank so far into it I could feel the mattress on my butt to either side of her. If I sat too far forward her legs hurt, too far back she'd bottom out. So my partner sat on the pillow end. I'd rather have added the weight elsewhere so the pillow would explode, but there was no room. She had to balance with a foot on the ground, so her weight wasn't all on the mattress, but we had about 2100 pounds on it now.

The additional weight worked to keep 205 pound girl from bottoming out. We bobbed for balance and watched the weight stack shift about. Rocked it a bit to be sure it hadn't bottomed out. I could bottom her out by bouncing, but when I wasn't doing that she was floating on a very hard air mattress, even with me on her lap.

These things normally break around one of the 18 pockets, and it's not a big enough seam to make a lot of noise or to deflate instantly. At best a popping noise and a quick deflation. But this time it wasn't the pockets that blew.

Boom! The thing deflated almost instantly. It was an inner support vein in the pillow end, but instead of just detaching from top or bottom surface and allowing that end of the mattress to bulge, the thing tore a hole in the top surface of the mattress at one end of the vein. About a hand-sized hole.

[lilolover82]

Rode a best way mattress for about 5 months now and my frequency of playing with it finally made a leak in the valve seam. If you push the valve inside the tubes now it begins deflating quickly.

[Yuldel]

Yes I like them, I still have an old air mattress from 10+ years ago. Still works fine