From the early days of climbing wall construction, two products seemed to prevail, pea gravel and shredded rubber. Both products are a loose product and tend to get tracked all over the facilities and even on occasion hitch a ride with your participant all of the way home attached to shoe strings or clothing. Over time, pea gravel has fallen out of favor due to wear issues on ropes, anchors, and other equipment. In its place, shredded rubber triumphed.
What is Shredded Rubber
Nicros offers two types of shredded rubber chunks for use as landing surfaces: standard recycled black rubber and colored rubber. Both are economical, effective choices for landing surfaces. Our recycled rubber products are low in odor, low in tire rubber content, free of steel wires and fiber, and they have very little rubber dust. For a “lighter” affect, black rubber can be layed down with a white layer on top and makes a big difference in the light levels that are shown around the climbing wall.
What makes Shredded Rubber so great?
Rubber is great because it’s a low-cost surface and, unlike other poured-in-place products, it is easy to install and easily replaceable. Shredded rubber often provides for a softer fall than other landing surfaces. The rubber that Nicros uses is low dust but not totally dust free.
Surface and Features
Rubber does need to be raked and move around to keep an even landing surface. As climbers fall off the wall and into the rubber, their feet tend to plunge into the rubber pushing and scattering it away from the location they land. Due to repeated use, and as people continually land in the same location, pits, or low areas of rubber can form. (This is certainly not ideal when the entire goal with a landing surface is to cushion a fall.) Simply raking and maintaining the areas at the base of the climbing wall will keep plenty of rubber in the fall zones.
Feel
The feeling of landing into rubber is a soft, absorptive feel. The rubber tends to dissipate around where the foot hits the top of the surface so it’s similar to landing in a sandbox.
Construction
The rubber comes in fifty pound bags which can be brought into the facility and set in areas across the floor approximately where the rubber is going to be laid. Rather than cut the end off the bag and try to pour it out, it’s easier to lay all of the bags down where the rubber is going to be spread approximately bag to bag. Once all the bags are down, simply slash the bags with a knife and pull the bag out from under the rubber. Once all of the plastic bags have been removed, the rubber can be walked on and raked to smooth it out and make it overall more uniform so there aren’t large pits and hills.
