How is a bouncy castle made?

Have you ever wondered how a bouncy castle inflatable is made? Here we will do our best to explain and show you how the inflatables that we hire out and made.

Just a quick note to say if you have come here looking for our catalogue to order a bouncy castle please just follow the link here to take you back to my main catalogue page.

We thought it might be interesting for people to see the manufacturing process that goes into making a bouncy castle, it is one of our most popular questions from customers along with how much does a bouncy castle cost etc.

The first step of manufacturing a bouncy castle is to take the the specialist bouncy castle PVC and print the artwork onto the bouncy castle panels. Assuming the artwork is digitally printed and not hand-painted as hand painted artwork is applied at the end when the castle manufacture is complete. Hand painted bouncy castles are less common these days as they just can't get the finished quality that digitally printed artwork can. As you can imagine there are special inks used for printing onto the PVC as the specialist substrate used for printing on  cannot be printed on by most printers.

After the printing has been finished, the whole panel needs to be laminated. Not all manufacturers do this, some cheaper ones don't bother however it does make your artwork a lot brighter for longer, have a better finish and also makes it more flame retardant and resistant to UV sunlight fading. There's also a strong argument that the laminated artwork makes the finished product scratch-resistant and a lot more flexible and stronger for longer.

As you can imagine it's quite a difficult task moving the bouncy castle around for stitching, therefore manufacturers actually use a mobile sewing machine because it's easier to move the sewing machine around then it is the whole inflatable.

Each wall and base is individually stitched by hand with each different colour panel being stitched together to make a wall, floor and roof and then the larger pieces are stitched together so the wall has a top and inside and outside and the bottom. The interesting bit comes in the fact a lot of people think of the bouncy castle is literally just a bag of air but actually there is a lot of baffling in the base of a bouncy castle. What this mean is when a child bounces it stops the air rushing out from under the person meaning they hit the floor.  The baffling is what retains enough air underneath the bouncer to make them bounce back up instead of hitting the ground.

Each unit uses high grade material and comes complete with sewn in rain cover, six anchor points and an inflation tube all of which have to be produced to the current Health and safety requirements, PIPA standard and current British Standard requirements.

Normally from start to finish, an experienced manufacturer could make a bouncy castle in about a day. Obviously the vast majority of the cost goes into the PVC which have you buy a high-quality bouncy castle specialist material  which is quite expensive however it is a lot more durable and looks a lot better.

I hope this very brief description has given me some idea as to how bouncy castles are made however we have attached the YouTube video below which shows are actually creating a bouncy castle from start to finish. As you can see if the bouncy castles are rolled for transportation and that's how they arrive at your door ready to be set up and your chosen location.