When things go bang.

[Richard Mason]

Originally Posted by marine boy

its even worse if its a hose on your pony

Why? Am I missing something here?

[Richard Mason]

Originally Posted by pies

Have just gone over to an H valve on the fifteen for those sites on shore where twin twelves are just toooo heavy.

Binning the very non-standard ali pony (no-one locally will touch it as it has American markings). Redundancy is the only way forward and the only way to always dive with redundancy on a single cylinder is an H valve...unless one has an alternative???

Pies

I've got an Aluminium pony. I was offered steel or Ally for the same price. Prefer ally as it's pretty close to neutrally buoyant so no issues with weighting if I decide not to take it. (eg 10m bimble). Same if I hand it to an OOA buddy.

Why do these things become "standard"?

[Richard Mason]

Originally Posted by Philelmer

Makes you worry about diving on singles though. I'd never even considered a pony before i started reading these forums, i just sort of borrow some gear from a dive shop and get on with it, but imagine if that happened 30m down while your buddy was busy waiting for a nemo to come out and have its picture taken (for the 18th time that minute) - pretty frightening...

Definitely getting some form of redundancy when I do get myself some kit though.....

My moment was at 20M on the GBR, diving singles with an "allocated" buddy; had an O-ring blow out, and the pr_ck refused to let me use his occie.

Had never heard of pony cylinders until I joined D-Net a couple of years ago. (I'm still one of only 3 members in my club who use one - neither PADI nor SSI promote them and they are the onlt training agencies hereabouts.)

After my previous unpleasant experience, this sounded like a top idea, so I went out & bought one.

The scarey scenario to me is that you are both at 30m, you have 100 bar left, your buddy goes OOA and suddenly, you have 50 bar each, except he is panicking and his SAC is 50-100L per minute, so you actually have more like 20 bar left after he's taken his "share".

[Peter M]

Originally Posted by tom

A single failure (cylinder neck O ring) will lose you all your gas. However, that's very rare - probably about as likely as a manifold going on a twinset.

.

This happened me in the pool at 3M, 232bar to 0bar in about 20 sec and it scared the bejesus outta me, hence the twins now !

[David]

Originally Posted by Freeflow

Right up to the point where there was a very loud bang, followed by the sound of a lot of gas escaping.

Samething happend to me but I was on a single. What happend well it felt like someone had hit the tank with a sledge hammer making it ring like a bell, lots of bubbles behind me. My buddy was there right in front of me we were in say 8 meters he gave an ok signal which I returned he then thumbed the dive. I still was not that sure what was going on only my reg worked something was very noisey and we were surfacing. Once on the surface my value was shut off but with little or no gas left the whole thing can only of taken two mins in total and I was out of gas, problem pressure gauge hose split close to 1st stage. To this day its all a bit of a blur still only good thing I was with someone I trusted and we were only shallow.

David

Ps I check my hoses more oftern now :-)

[String]

Had a student recently whose 6 month old HP hose "went". However it went in the proper way in that the outer layer vents did their job so no bang. It also did it on kitting up for the dive on the boat (having been tested, pressurised and fine in the car park previously).

Moral of the above is even new hoses aren't immune from failiure.