How To: Rubber Combinations

If you fly rubber and find that your motor is either too strong (and you want a slightly weaker motor) or too weak (and you want a slightly stronger motor, maybe you don’t know intuitively what is the next increment.  I encountered this and decided to develop a chart or table to help me.

This assumes two things:  1) you won’t be using a rubber stripper and 2) you have the 5 sizes of rubber available (1/16″, 3/32″, 1/8″, 3/16″. & 1/4″).  With these sizes of rubber, you will be able to combine them into nearly every 1/32″ increment.

The information is arranged in vertical columns.  Find the desired motor in the left-most column.  Then move across that row and each cell in that row offers a combination that creates that total.  Each column has a certain dimension of rubber as the Primary and then what secondary dimensions will need to be added.

The example that started me down this path was a motor that was 2 loops of 3/16″.  I thought it was maybe too strong, but what would be the next smaller size?  With this chart, I can see that 2 loops of 1/8″ plus 1 loop of 3/32″ is the next smaller increment – of one more step would be 1 loop of 3/16″ plus 1 loop of 1/8″.