Several years ago i took some pictures of my Remawear rubber Ultima because i was posting it for sale on eBay. To this day i still get questions regarding this wonderful piece of rubber mummification fun. Probably the most common questions are, “What’s an Ultima?” and “What’s it like to be inside it?” Since our intrepid host, Rubberasylum, has beseeched me to write a review on my Remawear Rubber Ultima Bag, here goes…

For starters, REMAWEAR, formerly of Sherwood House, Burnley Road, Todmorden, Lancashire, England, seems to have passed quietly into the ethereal plane of kink-history. Operated by one person out of their private residence for over 30 years, they were considered by many as innovators in the design and construction of rubber fetish and bondage gear. Even though their clientele originally came mainly from the straight European fetish community, their success eventually spread to and brought in many from the gay community as well. They had a number of catalogues that could be purchased for approximately £2 or £3 each, and orders were conducted pre-internet days via mail only; no phone inquiries and all ordered paid for in cash, cheque, or postal money orders only! If you think having to wait a couple of hours for someone to respond to your email is a pain, just think of how it was when you had to put your request for information in the post (snail-mail), and then wait a couple of weeks to over a month for a reply. As i recall, all correspondence required a self-addressed and stamped envelope so that the owner didn’t have to spend money on postage replying to silly questions from people who only wanted to waste his time. If you were not local to the UK, you had to send a money order along with your request to cover the postage or no reply would be forthcoming; some may say that this is cheap on the part of a retailer, but since the possibility of spending several hundred British Pounds on postage in replies with no orders, this was a way to weed out the time-wasters from the legitimate customers. Also, many of the replies were hand-written on slips of paper stapled to photocopies of order forms.

Remawear had approximately 9 catalogues crammed full of crude hand-drawn representations of their goods accompanying typewriter written descriptions. Each page looked like it was cut and pasted together and then photocopied multiple times to produce a catalogue… refined it wasn’t, but full of kinky gear that made the rubber perv hot and horny to buy something it did! Of course, each item was hand made and customized to whatever the customer wanted, and if an item wasn’t in their inventory, they would gladly make it for you according to your own design. (Unfortunately i no longer have my Remawear catalogues, because a few years ago i was cleaning out my files of out-dated material and these catalogues found their way into the pile of soon-to-be confetti.)

The “Ultima” was just one of the many items Remawear made, and they were probably the first to describe their ‘Ultimate’ Inflatable Rubber Sleepsack in this manner.

For those unaware, a rubber sleepsack is like a mummy-style sleeping bag that one might use for camping, but made entirely out of latex or neoprene rubber.The Ultima is more closely styled after an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus, with the body being tapered from the shoulders down to the toes to form a close fitting sack, and from the shoulders up a full rubber hood with only holes for breathing; hood options allowed for clear plastic eye-holes, breathing grommet holes or tubes at the nose and/or mouth, and an optional fixed solid or breathe-through inflatable gag ball. Entry was through a heavy metal zipper across the chest from armpit-to-armpit. The true ingenuity of the inflatable sleepsack that made it an ultimate experience in full body rubber mummification was there were two rubber sacks sealed one inside the other with an air-tight space in-between. This space could be filled with air via the two included small squeeze-bulb inflators connected to a couple of tire-valve fittings located near the lower abdomen, which took forever to fill the space, or using a blower (or scuba tank, my preferred choice) to fill the sack more rapidly. There was also a thin rubber sleeve/tube positioned between and below the inflators to quickly release the air from the sack, which could also accommodate a blower to inflate the sack as well; this tube had to be rolled and clamped-off when the sack was in use to complete the air-tight seal. Completely filled with air, the sack was pretty good at immobilizing the occupant, but not completely. Getting in and out or moving around wasn’t impossible, but definitely very difficult at best. i managed to use my Ultima many times for solo-play by turning it inside out, running a scuba tank hose through the entry zipper to the inflator in the “inside” and filling it up.

Many thought that when inside an Ultima the body would float on air in-between the inner and outer sacks. Unfortunately most of the Ultimas were designed with the inner sack hanging loosely inside the outer sack, so your body was encased in the inner sack and resting on the bottom or the outer sack, not floating in-between. Remawear did have an option to have a third air-cushion sack placed between the inner sack and bottom of the outer sack, so the occupant/victim was floating on an air-mattress of sorts, but this was a much more expensive option and as far as i’m aware, very rare.

Another question i was commonly asked was whether breathing was difficult when the Ultima was inflated due to the pressure around your body. Since rubber is inherently flexible and able to stretch to great distances, pressure often forced the outer sack to expand once the pressure reached a certain point, so all that happened was that the sack began to balloon out more rather that create more pressure on the occupant/victim within. One of the ways around this was to order the optional leather sack that went around the outer sack to prevent the Ultima from ballooning out, and therefore forcing the pressure to increase within. Since this was too expensive of an option for this poor pup, i opted to slip my Ultima inside one of my mummy-style sleeping bags and inflate it inside that. Once the Ultima occupied every nook and cranny of my sleeping bag the pressure began to grow to the point of causing a great deal of pressure on my whole body. Several times i had to stop because breathing did become difficult, and being the ever-curious pup with a devilish desire to experiment, mainly on myself, i hooked a tire pressure gauge up to one of the external valves and was able to get a pressure reading of between 15 & 20 PSI before i was gasping for breath!

While the air-filled Ultima was certainly the most common design, Remawear’s catalogue also had a water-filled version for sale. This sack was similar in construction to the air-filled variety, but instead of air-valves as inflators, there were two water faucet connectors for filling the inner sack with both hot and cold water simultaneously. Once the space between the inner and outer sacks was filled, the weight and volume of water would create an intense pressure around the body within. While the Water-Ultima was certainly an innovative device, i doubt many were sold. The inherent problems that might occur if the outer sack were to spring a leak or burst made this design much less desirable.

Alas like all things rubber, over-use and normal wear and tear took its toll and i had to add many patches to my Ultima. i learnt the hard way that rubber and brass or copper do not mix, because the metal would literally “liquefy/melt” the rubber around it, hence the need to permanently seal over the mouth hole where the gag inflator was inserted.

The reason i ultimately sold my Ultima (sorry for the pun… or maybe not!), was that i accumulated many more toys over the years so it seldom got used anymore. Before my Ultima passed into complete decay, i wanted it to have the chance to make someone else happy for a while longer… and according to the reports that reached my ears later, it certainly did!

- snoopy