WITHOUT rubber, the world would be a lot less fun. Rubber keeps us safe, rubber makes it fun, rubber keeps the bad things away from us and we are just talking about tyres and seals.
As a boy of 5 or 6 years old, I stayed with my grandmother, a strict matriarch who supported herself with a rubber smallholding. And every day she would keep some ridiculously early call time to go tapping.
By the time my brother and I woke up, she had returned and made us a simple breakfast and was busy sweeping the house. After that, she would go and collect the latex, which was white as milk and began processing it into the Standard Malaysian Rubber, better known as SMR.
SMR is the rubber standard set by the Malaysian Rubber Board or the Rubber Research Institute of Malaysia, and the different grades refer to rubber of a certain quality that has been processed, rolled, dried and smoked, or rubber scraps.
Since the income of millions of Malaysians depended on the price of rubber, part of my grandmother’s daily routine and that of other smallholders was to listen to the radio for the broadcast of SMR prices, which usually came up right about the same time as the news.
So, at about 10am every day, my grandmother would add some sort of acid to the rubber and would mix them until it sets like a large chunk of tofu.
And just like in the cartoon of rural Malaysian life by Datuk Lat, she would plop the coagulated rubber block on the cement floor of her shed, pull up her sarong slightly and begin stomping on the soft white mass.
Us kids would sometimes help with the stomping, which was kind of fun, and I can still remember the strangely satisfying sensation of stomping on soft rubber.
After the stomping, she would put the flattened rubber block through a roller and once it has achieved the correct thickness, she would hang it on a bamboo to dry.
Once dried, the rubber goes through another roller, if I’m not mistaken. This time, it imprints diagonal grooves on the rubber and as soon as she has enough sheets, they would go into the smokehouse for curing.
It’s all quite technical and if you are wondering how a simple villager knows how to do this, it’s because the government sent experts to train them and it was normal for rubber smallholders to be able to do this on their own.
The radio pronouncements of the market price of rubber was an important part of keeping the market honest because if the smallholders know what the prevailing market price is, then the wholesaler could not cheat them and wholesalers always try to get away with whatever they can.
An army of smallholders and commercial estates made Malaysia the biggest rubber exporter in the world in the 1970s, and I do feel proud of my contribution flattening at least five sheets of rubber during that time.
I don’t know where those sheets ended up, but I do hope that it went into good use. Maybe it ended up at Good Year or Pirelli or Dunlop, and became tyres for some great race or rally driver of even racing tyres for motorcycles.
The rubber industry in Malaysia is waning because we can no longer compete against South American giants like Brazil. But if the world suddenly finds itself short of rubber, we can rally the troops and start to produce again. But, of course, we would need three to five years for the tree to be mature enough for tapping.
I have had the chance to see those rubber blocks being transformed into tyres and process requires heavy kneading of natural rubber with synthetic rubber, carbon black and all sorts of other additives to create just the right sort of rubber for tyre making.
The rubber remains sticky throughout the process until it is finally cured in the tyre mould and then it is hard and durable.
It is quite amazing how we have learnt to coax and cajole tree sap into becoming one of the most versatile materials known to man that it has helped us to become modern society.
Without rubber we would have to imagine tyres being made of other materials and without tyres the world would not be what it is today.
Of course the most important process in the production of rubber is vulcanisation, which essentially makes the polymers more durable and we now know how to tune the polymers to achieve specific hardness, resistance to wear and flexibility to make it suitable for the final product.
I am going to assume that most Classic Chatter readers know that Charles Goodyear discovered the process of vulcanisation when Sulphur accidentally spilt on some rubber he was working on but I am putting it here because as a journalist we have to write for 10-year-olds and most 10-year-olds probably don’t know this little bit of trivia.
By the way if they want to make condoms or rubber gloves, the rubber has to arrive at the plant in milk form and not in solid form. I don’t know if 10-year-olds need to know this but I thought the older audience might find it mildly interesting.