Golfing in the rain isn’t ideal, but it’s par for the course (the puns are flowing today!). Here at Inesis, it’s our job to develop products that mean you can golf even when it rains, in optimal comfort and practicality. Maybe you’ll even prefer playing in the rain! Anything is possible.
So, we headed to Villeneuve d’Ascq, just outside of Lille, where part of our Decathlon SportsLab labs are set up. Today, we’re putting the jacket through “The Shower Test”. The Aim? To verify the waterproofing of a model, randomly selected from the store, as part of the development process for the new version of the product.
“The Shower” is an infernal machine, containing five hundreds litres of water. This water is then sent into the hydraulic circuit at a high pressure rate, thanks to powerful compressors. The results? The Shower can release hundreds litres of water per hour and per square metre. In weather terms, that would be a storm. We do this when we need to test ocean racing fabrics, for example.
For our test, we’ll simulate a shower, which is most often encountered on the golf course. The rain jacket needs to resist a heavy rain for 2 hours (you rarely spend 4 or 5 hours on the green in heavy rain). In the North, we’d say it’s raining cats and dogs. We position a mannequin in the test zone, and dress it in a long-sleeved, grey cotton top, as an underlayer. This colour offers the advantage of making damp or wet areas obvious.
After the test, Léo, our industrialisation testing engineer in the soft lab, has drafted his report. He’s noted all the details: whether the underlayer top is wet, in what places, and to what extent. The jacket is also weighed before and after the test, in order to see whether the fabric has absorbed any water. The method engineers then get to work on the results, aiming to understand where any potential waterproofing issues have come from, and how to solve them, using the knowledge we’ve gathered over several years in the field.
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