I finally have ordered 3 male fullsize inflatable mannequins (silver, black, ivory colour) from the above company. Here is my review.
ordering:
I had asked for a discount but they refused, so I paid the regular price of each 29.95 US$ plus even 51.50$ for insured shipping to Europe (
USPS Express Mail International) because about every 3rd uninsured parcel from overseas seems to disappear forever.
On 2010-10-14 I transferred 103.22€ through PayPal. On 2010-10-25(?) I found in my mailbox an envelope with 2 gibberish form cards from customs office. I phoned them how to pay, but they requested me to travel personally to the customs office and give them 2 hardcopies of the order form and payment receipt. So I had to go by train there (paid 2x 2.75€ for tickets) and pay >19€ VAT.
Possibly they forced me to come personally and re-open the parcel (that already was pre-opened by customs and re-sealed with printed adhesive film) because to my annoyance the parcel turned out to be underinsured with only 39US$ claimed value despite the bill inside showed the genuine price. So I am not sure if insured shipping was worth the afford (uninsured parcels are often even skipped by customs and so cost no VAT), but loosing the expensively paid parcel for unknowable reasons would be certainly the even greater annoyance.
packaging:
Inside the parcel was the bill, a pink instruction sheet and the 3 inflatable mannequins those were each faithlessly crushed into a tiny transparend plastic bag with printed sticker "Fullsize male with head and arms" (no brand name) closed with a piece of adhesive film. Each bag also contained a piece of patch foil and 2 tiny PVC tubings (about 4cm by 2mm diameter?) intended to hold the valve flaps open for easy deflation.
quality:
After unwrapping the mannequin dolls, their toxic chemical stench soon revealed that they were made of the typical cheap and flimsy Chinese soft PVC foil. This stuff releases the infamously well known antiprana smelling like chlorine mixed with xylene/ toluene and phthalate vapours that made me nearly pass out and forced me to vent the bathroom for many days. I also thoroughly washed them in warm soap water to remove surface dirt, but it will likely take weeks of venting until the solvent odour is gone.
The white ("ivory colour") mannequin had a pinhole in the left chest half that looked like when the foil was crushed by a hard and heavy object on a crossfolded spot. (Hypothetically it might be even result of a customs test for smuggled illicit drugs or whatever their sick mind may have expected inside such very lightweight inflatables.) So I patched it with transparent fishtank silicone glue. It also has slightly different head with wider foil strip as chin, which makes him stare at the ceiling in a strange angle. So it may be an older version, because it was the only specimen with a company sticker on the rear stand mount sleeve. The black mannequin has a welded patch (about 2x2cm) in the back, which was likely done in the factory.
By the crushed packaging they looked very wrinkled after inflation, so I very carefully heated them by hair dryer to smoothen them. (I don't recommend to do much heatstretching with them; unlike simpler dolls, most shape changes only make them uglier.)
construction:
Unlike my initial expectation, the awesome body of these inflatable mans contain neither cardboard pieces nor other solid reinforcements. So these ethereal beings of absolute balance weight each only about 470g. Their entire body consists of only one air chamber; the chest is vertically (from neck center to scrotum) devided by a central membrane that apparently is connected to some horizontal triangular "sails" welded to the chest front to form the abs and breast definition (without appearing also on the back). Only when underinflated, there is a strange wrinkle visible in the middle above his heart. The shoulders are made from 3 panels (additional triangle at the front) to make arms look more natural than the ugly 2 panel sausages of most inflatables. Only the head is a separate chamber.
Both chambers have fairly small inlet valves with the usual kickback flap inside. While this makes sense for the head (small volume), for the body it makes inflation unnecessarily difficult unless it is manually squeezed open, so I have cut the flap out with nail scissors and a drill. Unlike told by the instruction sheet, I can only warn not to inflate such poisonous stinking plasticized PVC items by mouth, so the flap is anyway pointless to "keep air in between breaths".
The impressive body shape is unusual and looks like a 1990th sci-fi robot. The head is too small and somewhat triangular when not overinflated; also the neck is unusually thin with a few wrinkles. The chest has only 2 abs/sixpack lines but looks nicely athletic; on the back you can estimate a spine in the wavy center seam. The arms are nicely defined but unfortunately lack hands (you may retrofit them with glued vinyl gloves). Instead of genitals there is just a bulge. The butt has fairly visible cheeks and the legs look a little thin with a little funny and shoe-shaped feet. Unlike most human shaped inflatables, the legs are not spread at all when normally inflated; the feet even touch each other (you may adjust them by heatstretching with a hair dryer at his crotch); also the feet tips point rather a little up than down. (The female mannequin version looks IMO much uglier and at least some variants have down pointing ballet toe feet like cheap love dolls). Although they can not easily stand by their own, they can lean against a wall and there is a plastic ring for a nylon string on their head (and the stand sleeve on their back) to hold them in place.
Like many Chinese inflatables, these mannequins are noticeably too small; instead of the claimed 68 inches (172.72cm, just like me!) they are only about 166cm when normally inflated, and due to the complex inner construction I also can not recommend to try to overinflate the body to that size because the chest support mechanism may easily tear (like it slowly happened with the shoulder blades inside my heatstretched "Gorgeous Gavin" bodybuilder) which can not be repaired without a degree in - eh -
plastic surgery. Only the head may be safely expanded a bit more by heatstretching. Careful local heatstretching may be applied to finetune his breast shape, but do not mess with the arms and especially regard that the head position is stabilized by the left and right shoulder rims, so do not mess these up. (These patented guys are result of really complex designed engineer work and not just 2 halves of a cut out 2D outline pattern welded together.) But generally this perfectly defined body looks much better when only moderately inflated. The tiny wavy ripples at some seams (neck etc.) rather enhance their unearthly semi-organic robot appeal than spoiling it.
conclusion:
I see these inflatable beings with mixed emotions. The technical design is brilliant but the poisonous stinking Chinese PVC is awful. And the ways they came crushed into unlabelled plastic bags like cheap 1€ items reveals that they are obviously the same kind of sweatshop piecework like most other Chinese plastic products and that the big money is obviously made by somebody else.
The instruction sheet by the
Inflatable Mannequins company has a note "Copyright 2004-2009 Advanced Sales Technologies, LLC", but the Chinese manufacturer seems to be
Shunyi Development Co., Ltd..
But I hope someone will soon create inflatable entertainment robots looking like this. By employing the
Babot mechanism, limbs reinforced by
Tensairity structures and some additional air chambers controlled by a tiny electro-pneumatic unit it shouldn't be too hard to mass-produce a genuine lightweight inflatable machine-man that can walk and dance and perhaps do some exiting acrobatic things with a live weight of only several 100g to few kg.
Has anybody seen these male inflatable torso mannequins?
