Basic block foam that is kept in bulk at many upholstery shops. Better cushions are engineered to a specific piece and not cut from block. They are not latex (there is no 100 % natural latex, even the purest blends are 92 % latex, most though are closer to 50 %). DuPont Qualax is considered to be the best man-made foam cushion for the upholstery market and they come in different densities.
No idea on the Ultracell spelling....sorry
Duane Collie
Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.
Thanks for the information. I called Seamcraft to inquire about purchasing Ultracel foam, and was basically given the run-around. I'm fairly convinced that they had it - they just didn't want to make it available to me. They probably want to keep it "exclusive" to certain high-end furniture manufacturers.
Do you or anyone know of a place that would offer Ultracel foam blocks (or foam of a equivalent quality - such as the DuPont Qualax ) direct to the consumer?
Or - do you know of any foam that is directly accessible to the average consumer that is high-quality and less likely to offgas? I'm trying to locate foam in which offgassing is minimized - or - better yet - eliminated altogether. My recent interest in Ultracel/DuPont Qualax is due to my idea that the higher quality/manufacturing-standards of these foams would translate to reduced offgassing. This is just a glorified "hunch" - for I know very little about the foam industry and the various factors that contribute to foam offgassing. There just doesn't seem to be any real information out there about offgassing, and what may be done to reduce offgassing; there is not much transparency to the foam industry. Information such as the measures they may take to make foam more stable and less likely to offgass - or the exact chemicals that are added to make foam "fire-retardant" - is hard to come by.
All foam is a chemical product, basically made with petroleum so when oil prices rise so does the cost of foam. Its virtually impossible to stop out-gassing from any petroleum based product. The premium cushion makers are not going to talk to you in the phone, sorry! They deal with manufacturers who buy truckloads (Hancock and Moore gets two full semi trailer shipments of cushion cores every day for example) and have no interest in s single consumer sale.
You can try these guys but I've never used them - they sell Dupont Qualux in small batches:
http://www.house-of-foam.com/index.p...=index&cPath=7
Duane Collie
Straight answers from thirty-six years in the business.
My Private Messages are Disabled - Please ask questions here in the forum.
Thanks for the tip. I ended up ordering a couple of Qualux foam pieces from this place. (Hopefully, they really are Qualux or of Qualux quality.) I didn't even have to place a call.
http://www.foamsource.com/
I suppose the reason why I didn't find this website earlier is because I was Googling "DuPont Qualux", instead of just "Qualux".
As for foam offgassing - well, I wish the industry would have come up with a way to stabilize, or "seal" the foam so that offgassing wouldn't be an issue. You would have thought that they could have come up with such a process by now - since foam has been in existence for several decades. There are people who are quite sensitive to offgassing - even the supposedly "small" amounts of offgassing can be bothersome.
I mean, with all of the innovations that have come about in technology and industry - how difficult would it be to produce foam that does not offgass?
Instead, it seems that the foam offgassing problem has grown worse over the years, instead of improved.