again not quite a "trip report" but........
Having only met Neil Brock on a couple of occasions, I asked a couple of reliable friends about him & the course and he came well recommended.
Neil is an old school diver, diving from an early age, having been down the commercial diver route and with the help of his ever-helpful wife Maggie, runs
Bristol Channel Diving Ltd, which is a real divers type shop & workshop not a glossy showroom. He is, what I would class as a “been there, seen it, done it, got the t-shirt” type of bloke, exactly the type of person you want to learn from. He knows what he’s talking about but doesn’t appear a know-it-all, confident but not cocky.
Anyway, there were a couple of reasons behind me wanting to do the course. Firstly I didn’t have the knowledge to look inside my regs with any confidence, secondly I didn’t know the cylinder cleaning process and thirdly I had a shit-load of stuff that needed servicing & didn’t really just want to keep on paying someone else to do it for me. So I thought it was about time to learn some more useful stuff.
Now to be honest, the course does cost £300, which isn’t cheap, nothing in diving life ever is! But (and it’s a big but) you do get to service a small number of your own reg’s & cylinders on the course. Neil includes 3 full sets of reg service kits in the course fee (this in itself adds up to nearly £100 for my Poseidon’s) as well as all the sundry items such as cleaning solutions, lots of cloth, use of specialist kit/tools, numerous O rings, misc items, TDI certification, etc.
The “official” course as I understand it is a one day course which is the basic cleaning course but Neil’s course is much more comprehensive 3 days. There were two of us on the course which was a surprise as I originally thought, as it was midweek, it would be just me, but it was good to share ideas with the other student (Craig). It was also good to see other makes of kit and mine were all very similar Poseidon’s. A quick look at Neil’s calendar showed it’s quite a popular course.
It was early on Tuesday morning that I found myself on the way down to Neil’s workshop.
Day one started with the theory and a look at various components of reg’s, from the very basic, upto the very complex. Also we learnt about the cleaning processes.
One thing which very quickly became apparent is that there isn’t one absolutely agreed way to do things. One manufacturer may suggest using a certain cleaning solution, another will say specifically not too!
Day one afternoon we went into the workshop and start work. Over the afternoon and indeed all the second day was regulator servicing and cleaning. Neil adapts his teaching upon the competency of the students. He uses the method; show you what to do, watch you do it, then problem solve. We had various breakages along the way, not surprising given some of the history of the kit we were servicing. Another good thing about Neils workshop, he has all the right equipment and (I reckon) 99% of parts on the shelf if something is damaged, broken or won’t come out in one piece. Now we can’t all afford to buy the true manufacturers servicing tools but Neil explained what you could and couldn’t get away with using/buying. Testing was completed by only doing one part at a time, for example, servicing the 1st stage, reassembling it, testing it with the 2nd stage, adjusting as necessary, then doing the same on the 2nd stage. That way if there was a problem we only had one bit to look at!
On timings, during the afternoon of day 1, a single 2nd stage took me 2 hours to strip, clean, reassemble and test, asking questions every two minutes it appeared. By the end of day two, I was happy to strip two 1st stages at the same time, clean, reassemble and test, all within 1 hour, a vast improvement not only on time but in confidence.
Day three dawned and first we covered the very basics of suits, standard power inflaters and autoairs. Moving on we looked at various pillar valves, old and new, staright and tapered.
Moving on, we then looked at a couple of scary cylinders Neil keeps as a warning that high pressure can cause problems if not correctly stored!
Then back down into the workshop for the cylinder and valve cleaning. Again it was a process of; I’ll explain, I’ll show, I’ll let you while I watch, I’ll watch you less and just ask any questions as you go along. Again we were working on our own kit but this is were Craig came in especially useful. I took all ali stages as test kit and to be honest, they were all clean and tidy but a couple of Craig’s club cylinders were steels and showed good examples of various light rust pattern, showing us the levels between when they would need a shotblast and when its staining rather than rusting. Cylinders & valves were then tested by filling with HP air.
A basic exam, then a good chat with Neil to ensure we knew the importance of what we now knew and how to use that knowledge. Also a quick safety briefing, basically don’t service stuff and the take it to the extremes.
We passed but I must admit, the qualification doesn’t mean a lot. I would more than happily have done the 3 day course just for the experience of it rather than the qualification, I hope you understand what I mean.
One thing, back to the cost of the course, Neil is not a 9 to 5 bloke, he puts the hours in. Both me and Craig took a fair amount of kit to service whilst on the course and Neil was OK with this. As an example, Neil’s official working hours are 09:30 to 17:30, but on Wednesday we started at 08:00 and worked through until 19:30. Again on Thursday we started at 08:00, so don’t take the course as a easy 3 dayer, it isn’t but it is most certainly very good experience.
Neil and Maggie can be contacted via
Bristol Channel Diving Ltd or
www.neilbrock.co.uk
Oh, and various YD’rs called in during the course. Obviously they have nothing better to do but they didn't dare bring any of their kit in with them
