Weight System?

[gunsentry]

Hi All,

What weight system do you use with your harness?

I require 4Kg extra ballast.
I dive on twin Faber 12s, steel back plate and wing also Canister torch 0.9Kg.

I have yet to find a suitable system to attach to my harness belt.

The Halcyon Active Control Ballast System (4.5 kg) seems ideal, But £90.00!!! Bloody hell!!!

Any advice would be appreciated. (Needs to be ditch able).

Thanks in advance.

[johnkendall]

Originally Posted by gunsentry

Hi All,

What weight system do you use with your harness?

I require 4Kg extra ballast.
I dive on twin Faber 12s, steel back plate and wing also Canister torch 0.9Kg.

I have yet to find a suitable system to attach to my harness belt.

The Halcyon Active Control Ballast System (4.5 kg) seems ideal, But £90.00!!! Bloody hell!!!

Any advice would be appreciated. (Needs to be ditch able).

Thanks in advance.

Put a 4kg V-weight between your twins.

Hth
John

[gunsentry]

Not practable, the weight needs to be ditchable.

[Digger]

I don't think it can be. You could wear a weightbelt under your harness, but as far as I know that's not the way to do it DIR.

Other options are to just put some pockets on your harness etc. (any pocket will do if you need to ditch it yourself, the zeagle type with a pull-cord would do nicely) or if a buddy was doing it, but none of these options are DIR AFAIK.

So, £90 or do it another way. I know what I'd be doing. Well, making a P-weight, because I don't have a mould for a V-weight, but neither of these are ditchable.

Why's it got to be ditchable? Seems to cause more problems than it solves for my money!

[tom]

I assume you've thought of a weightbelt and rejected it for some reason.

If you only need 4kg and you want it ditchable, how about the little weight pockets Halcyon make for slipping on your tank cam band (for trim)? They take 2kg each.

http://www.dirdirect.com/astro/Trim_...Pocket3958.htm




The weights are held in the pocket by a velcro flap and a little QR buckle. You could mount them upside down on your waist strap. The buckle would prevent accidental dropping of weights; when you wanted to ditch them just unclip the buckle and pull the velcro flap open. If you use shot bags instead of blocks, they should fall out easily.

Might be a bit of a bodged solution - and I'm sure there's a better one - but this would be about half the price of the ACB thingy.

[Davey Willo]

Hi Gary

Why ditchable mate? if you make sure that you dive a balanced rig you should never really need to be overly concerned with ditchable weight, but I also understand peoples concerns about it, so with that in mind I can only suggest a weightbelt.

They are acceptable within DIR, I've dived with buddy's that prefer a weightbelt to a v-weight, some because like yourself they feel more comfortable with ditchable weight but others using a belt to help with trim issues.

Just make sure that you have the belt underneath the harness/crotchstrap so that if an accidental release occurs (which is actually the biggest danger you'll probably ever face in diving.. IMHO) then you should hopefully have a chance to catch it before it drops away completely.

Regards
Dave.

[gunsentry]

Why's it got to be ditchable? Seems to cause more problems than it solves for my money![/quote]

Need to be able to drop ballast in case of failure in dry suit or wing flooding.
If I utilised V\P weights I would not be unable to ditch and achieve some sort of positive buoyancy.

A flooded suit\wing weights an awful lot and utilising alternative buoyancy, inflating suit and or wing may not be able to compensate for the additional weight of the water ingress and achieve lift.

Adding gas to displace the water in the suit\wing would only deplete gas supply and water would again ingress into the failure point

[Janos]

Originally Posted by gunsentry

Need to be able to drop ballast in case of failure in dry suit or wing flooding.
If I utilised V\P weights I would not be unable to ditch and achieve some sort of positive buoyancy.

Hum. Personally I would say "failure of dry suit AND wing flooding"

Originally Posted by gunsentry

A flooded suit\wing weights an awful lot and utilising alternative buoyancy, inflating suit and or wing may not be able to compensate for the additional weight of the water ingress and achieve lift.

Got to disagree with you here mate, you don't need to compensate for the additional weight, as water is neutrally buoyant in water.

Someone in our club once jumped into the water to cool off with her zip entirely open (membrane suit) and although she ended up quite wet, she wasn't dragged to the bottom (indeed she was very buoyant), so although a flooded suit does lose air, it's by no means an immediate thing, and remember this isn't a small puncture, this is the zip fully open!

But if non-ditchable weight doesn't float your boat, why not a simple weightbelt? Especially as it's only 4kg we're talking about?

Laters,
Janos

PS - Deeply jealous. I'd love to be able to use only 4kg of weight...

[Digger]

I don't see it. If you divea drysuit, in a wing, you should have enough buoyancy not to need to ditch lead. You could get yourself into a position where you could be extremely overweighted but you'd have to have a whole lot of cylinders on to need to make that much difference by ditching weight.

If your wing isn't big enough to float your kit, you should get a bigger one. Your drysuit flooding is your major problem as far as I can see, and you lose some buoyancy, but not so much that you're going to sink like a rock with a fully flooded wing. If that's the case - bigger wing again.

Depleting gas supply seems low on my list, but I'd not thought about it a great deal. I'd take the depletion of gas supply over the uncontrolled manner of ascending minus weights.

A lot of people like to introduce themselves in the intro area, and maybe if you're diving DIR or have a lot of questions about it you could post an intro in this section too. It helps us know what sort of advice we should be offering, and how to pitch it, as well as being a good way of everyone knowing more about you! Just a suggestion though, it's not required by any means.

Dave, thanks for clearing that up. I didn't know whether it was a DIR solution to this one. I should add that I don't dive DIR and don't know a lot about it, other than info I've gained here and talking to DIR divers. If you only want a DIR solution to this that's ok with me, but I just wanted to post in general, partly as it won't just be you reading the responses!

Hope this helps.

[Digger]

Other option is to just put the 4lb on your waistband. I know quite a few who do this with mixed results. Now I dont need any lead, but used to use a P-weight because I found the blocks moved about a fair bit, and weren't comfortable once tanks and bits go over the top.