In case you don’t know, the POTMC (Protective Outfit Toxicological Microclimate Controlled) suit was made for the US Army for rocket fuel installers. Most of them were made in the 1980s and they are incredibly hard to find and there weren’t very many made. Fortunately, a friend of mine knew someone who was selling one and it just went from there.

The POTMC suit looks strikingly similar to a space suit, which is one of the reasons why they are so popular in the fetish community. The whole suit, minus the air pack is marked “Lite Industries, INC.”. The air pack says ILC Dover on it, which makes me question if Lite Industries actually made the rest of the suit or if the whole thing was made by ILC Dover and Lite Industries put their name on it. Remember, ILC Dover was responsible for making and designing a lot of space suits, and like I said before this suit looks strikingly similar to a space suit.

The suit was made incredibly well, and comes with a lot of stuff packaged in two separate bags. More of the suit appears to be made out of metal than plastic, which includes just about all of the fittings and the glove/boot rings. Even the more vulnerable parts of the suit, such as the helmet were still thought out: the mouthpiece assembly can be attached to the other side of the hemet so it can continue to be used if the front of the helmet becomes too scratched.

In a way, the POTMC suit acts a lot like the PRPS suit where there is a blower assembly that sucks air in through a filter and blows it into the suit while exhausting the old air out of the suit. For being nothing more than a blower motor and plastic, the air pack weighs about the same as a school bookbag loaded with four or five large textbooks and is pretty clunky to wear since it is so big. The bottom straps on the air pack are designed to hold a 6 volt battery on each side, and hook up to each side in series to the airpack. I didn’t get the batteries since they would most definitely be dead at this point, but one of the previous owners soldered a 12 volt power supply to the fan connector and would plug that in to an extension cord. I secured that and removed the kettle cable and made a special power adapter with a 25 foot cable and a 6/12 volt power adapter so I can control the voltage (because the fan motor at 12 volts sounds like a leaf blower) and used the remains from a connector that plugs into the original battery so it can be modular.

The suit itself is comprised of three different “suits”. There is an inner suit that is designed to disperse the air coming in evenly around the person wearing the suit to keep them cool. There is the middle which is the main butyl suit, and there is an outer suit that goes around the butyl suit that is fire resistant.

The helmet is… well, the helmet. Despite what it looks like, the helmet is made of plastic and not glass. There is a white cover with an attached visor that is supposed to be in place, but removing it does not detract from the quality of the helmet and it comes on and goes off easily. As I previously mentioned, the mouthpiece assembly can be taken off and swapped with an airtight plug on the back so the helmet can be reversed if the front is too scratched. That mouthpiece attaches to a rubber thing that goes around the wearer’s neck that has air filters so the person wearing the suit can safely breath if the airpack quits working. I believe there is also a version that attaches to a small SCBA tank instead of taking outside air. On the front and back of the helmet there are diaphragms that help with communication with the person inside the suit and people outside the suit.

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