Homemade Crash Pads

Thanks Mike for the tips. Any more information would be much appreciated as well. I am ordering the scraps tonight and I plan on making a couple of these for my woody that is almost complete.

When you land on it, does it bottom out? Would putting carpet on it disperse the impact at all if it does bottom out?

How difficult was the sewing of the fabric? Thanks for any advice you can give.
Edit: also, you found muslin wide enough to make one big strip on top? I dont see a seam on top, so it would appear that is the case.

Yes, that is one big piece of muslin. You should be able to get fabric at least 5' wide. That pad does not bottom out. It depends on how much foam you put in there. If you find that it's bottoming out, put in more foam. The sewing isn't too hard because you are mostly doing long straight lines. However, it's never a bad idea to have an expert do it for you, if you have one available. You are dealing with a ton of fabric which can be tricky to feed through the sewing machine, but it's not impossible.

Make sure you put the opening along the longest edge of the pad, or you will have trouble getting all the foam in there.

Well Mike. Thanks for the advice. I attempted my first huge pad today with enough stuff for 2 more. It certainly doesnt look as good as yours. Itlooks like blown up footballs between the baffles. It will work for falling on your knees, but it looks like an ankle breaker with the odd shaped foam pieces inside. How did yours turn out so flat and smooth looking? Did you put the foam pieces in like tetris to get a perfect fit?

Haven't tried it out on anything super highball, but me and my friends used two old spring mattress stacked on top of each other, it worked for problems about 20 feet high, nobody complained about the impact

What density foam would I need from the foam factory for a pad?

I am not a crash pad designer, just a guy who works with poly often as a seating designer/engineer. Use what follows at your own risk.

In the land of poly (aka foam) density is not so much a measure of squish as it is cost and durability. They go up correspondingly. In the case of a crash pad you won't want to go too dense because it will be too heavy to carry or to far the other direction as the poly will break down prematurely. 18-23 is a good target here. The measure you are after is ILD now more often IFD which are both similar to really bad approximations of spring coefficient.

The crash pads, the good ones are not so simple, as any cover on a big chunk of poly. The cover and the top bottom sheets are playing a big part in how it is catching you. Neither are particularity soft, the coated duck (think sunbrella) like material most of the covers are made of are not just durable for the sake of abrasion resistance but purposely not stretchy, the top and bottom sheet not soft so as to spread out the load of your falling body and to bridge over any rocks below. The core itself is not adequate to prevent your coxis/ankle from being driven right into the ground. You would not want to carry around the weight of the poly required to to that by itself nor would you like the catch it would give.

My very non scientific sitting, standing, and falling on crash pads makes me think that the top and bottom sheet are probably ild of 60 or more and the center core somewhere around 36 perhaps more. I would think you would want to top and bottom bonded to the core.

Looking at foam factory looks like you could make two std size pads with their packaging foam and the mattress foam for about $80 the cover is going to run the same if not more in materials and you won't be sewing it on any conventional sewing machine.

Considering all that it makes the mad rock mad pad look pretty affordable and tested.

YMMV.

I made my own crash pad recently and I found a high school that had a gymnastics team that no longer exists and got several 4" soft foam mats as well as some old 1" high density foam. Just packed 2 sheets of the high density foam into the 4 incher and boom amazpants crash pad. cost 100 dollars but that was with 1x16" crash pad, the 4 incher, 4 1" pads, pommel horse, and several wrestling mats so I would say that it was pretty cheap the size of the crash pad is 6ft by 12ft