Buddy Ranger BCD

[CotoChris]

<font color='#0000FF'>Before wearing the new BCD on Saturday I thought I try out in the pool and play about with the spare air. First the jacket is great, a great fit and I was 'as snug as bug in rug'.
I was well overweight as firstly I forget it was fresh water, the extra weight with the spare air and also I was wearing a thin 0.5mm shark suit.
The time came when I started to play with the spare air, I realise the limits of this but since I have it thought I tried it to the limit. (I have the auto air). Turned the cylinder off and soon noticed the air of the jacket diminuishing, so opened &amp; closed the spare air and yep it worked fine, then turned on the main cylinder afterwards. I did this three times to quickly notice that I used up all the spare air, not much there and this was at 1.5m deep!!
I realise this is not a redundancy system but I was intreaged to see it work. I'm quite happy about it but now I can't wait to try out the jacket Saturdays dive.
My main thought after trying this in the pool was that it is about time to get a pony...

[DanG]

Not totally familiar with the ranger jacket, is it using the air2 inflater as a reg and using the ascent bottle as the air source when the main cylinder is empty?
If so then yeh, theres not exactly enough in that to do a safety stop, just get you to the surface is all. &nbsp;Tried something similar once using my buddy jacket but that had just a normal inflator so was quite tricky to breathe off, possible though.
I wholeheartedly support the use of pony cylinders and would encourage anyone to get one

[CotoChris]

Originally Posted by [b

Quote[/b] (DanG @ Aug. 29 2003,05:02)]Not totally familiar with the ranger jacket, is it using the air2 inflater as a reg and using the ascent bottle as the air source when the main cylinder is empty?
If so then yeh, theres not exactly enough in that to do a safety stop, just get you to the surface is all.  Tried something similar once using my buddy jacket but that had just a normal inflator so was quite tricky to breathe off, possible though.

<font color='#0000FF'>If for someone reason you run out of air from main cylinder or -burst o-ring, 1st stage failure then you use the air2inflater reg. This allows you to breath the air from the jacket, in turn you need to re-inflate using the spare air bottle. Now there isn't that much air in the jacket and spare air - you would have fun with bouyancy! So the way I would see this is that if there is a problem you can get a few breaths of air in time to reach your buddy. On shallow dives you could have enough to go up, if you had run out of air then you get some extra as the air expands as you go up.
It is not the easiest of regs to breath off, the mouth piece seems quite large (feels like blowing on an exhaust pipe) but OK for emergency.