umbilical torches... DIY or buy?

[Noel Johnson]

Hi all,

Is it worthwhile building your own umbilical? If so what is the best way of going around this? If not who makes a good one for about 200 to 250 squids?

Cheers all,

Noel.

[NotDeadYet]

Unless you have access to a lathe and a good supply of materials then you're much better of buying one.

AUL make good ones www.dpvrepair.com as Sartek though pricey www.sarind.com

[Rick Huggins]

I concur

By the time you source everything and have it machined, theres not a lot of difference. Plus, do you trust your own work enough to jeopardise a 80 quid bulb, and thats not even talking about a ballast if you go HID.

Have a look at http://www.stealthdive.com

HTH

[Woz]

Yep. I agree. Having made my own, unless you have a lathe and know how to use it then get your wallet out. There are some great units out there now the market has settled a bit and prices have come down due to competition.

[Digger]

Noel, there's a group of us buying at the DIve Show. Porbbaly Halcyon, probably Pro 3. They retail at £340, but Mark and Andy bought 2 last year at £300 each, and at the moment there's 2 of us that are definite, and another 2 maybes. So if you come in on that I can see us getting one hell of a deal. I want to get into £280 territory, I've got all day to haggle with them, and a lot of buying powe if we all go in on it. That said it will depend a lot on their cost price, but I think with that sort of volume it's a winner.

I tried to DIY it a while back in a similar fashion to Dom's DIY torch (ie without lathe) and it's in the kitbag waiting to be fixed. Again. Leaked at 47m, which wasn't bad, but once it goes a bit you get a lot of problems. Seawater can do things to copper wires and connectors I never thought possible. It cost me nearly £100 for a 20W halogen which burned for about an hour on full beam. Not really worth it because I couldn't ever rely on it.

That said, if you go the way of the stealthdive canister you're buying a clone made by someone with the same tools as the big manufacturers, but you're not going to ge that going for less than a couple of hundred over your budget.

Hope this helps.

Digs.

[Padowan]

I wouldn't do it to try and save money, but it's good fun building anything.

I built one a while back, needed some bits machined, but it was based around some pipe - I decided to use thinner wall stuff, and use the batteries to provide internal support, rather than build a really heavy duty canister, this was mainly because of the sizes of pipe available to me at the time. I used 50mm plumbing fittings to construct the lamp head, and I could fit any sized Dichroic into it to vary the brightness and burntime. Canister was about the size of a pony cylinder, and had about 13Ah capacity at 12V, running on SLA batteries. Magnetic reed switch operated a relay to put on the power without intruding into the sealed space. Worked great for ages - first problem I had was when I kept uprating the lamp head - I ended up with a 150W unit (that is REALLY bright, I can tell you), but on the way to this power I melted the wiring due to the 12amp current draw and the heat from the lamp melted the connections inside the lamp head (the head itself would have melted in a minute of two out of the water ). The wiring was uprated to cope with the current but when I reassembled it, I forgot to put some packing back in to support the pipe walls, and unfortunately on a test dive in Stoney it imploded spectacularly on top of the hydrobox Thudooof! But with it being fresh water, it still ran for nearly an hour while it was completely open to the elements

[NotDeadYet]

Digger,

another bit of leverage that no doubt Halcyon don't want you knowing is that Welch Allen have stopped production of HID ballasts and bulbs and will not be shipping until into the New Year. So that means no spares or bulbs being available for a while.

Try asking them loudly about this while there are lots of people around the seller's stall and see what kind of discount you get. I'm sure it may be worth it to keep you quiet.

Cheers,

Stuart

[PrettyFishies]

If you buy anything at the dive show, make it Greenforce. Over the past few years I've tried every torch on the market and I have had signficant problems with other makes of torches despite them being depth rated to 100m+. The green force are the only ones that can handle repeated deep diving and they are extremely robust wreck diving tools. For reliability the lights are second to none and the company Green Force have extremely efficient customer service. I've been hammering down shot lines and had to bang other makes of lights on the wreck due to poor connections, never ever with the Green Force have I encountered any such problems, I wish I had bought them years ago.

I have 2 x 100 watt HID running off an F4 battery pack and they are the best thing I've ever bought. This battery pack will give 90 hours of burn time on LED lights!!

There is a smaller battery pack, the F3, this is also a fantastic tool for wreck and cave applications and provides ample redundancy for both main and back up lights.

For these lights, you can buy the handles for them too however I have both lights mounted on one handle so I can use one only and keep on in reserve or use both together for a fantastic bright beam..the bolt is countersunk in the handle and the handle is fully adjustable.

The greenforce system is completely modular quite unlike any other lighting system I have tried. It will cater for everything from back up torches, to main wreck diving lights, to video lights to LEDs to helmet mounts.

I really recommend having a look at Green Force's product range before making ANY decisions about buying lights.

I suppose it depends what your experience with a particluar brand is but Greenforce is one I wouldn't even consider buying. Too many folk in my old club had problems with them either not working or bits falling off.

[john]

best thing since sliced bread
10w hid f3 batt 4hr burn time never had a prob in18 months