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This is a private email message that Greg Ryan sent me regarding his side-mount configuration. He gave me permission to forward it to the lists. Also, I added the below paragraph from Greg to his original: By the way, feel free to edit my description down as you feel necessary. I also wouldn't mind if you added that the original idea came up during the first sump diving course Rob Palmer ran for us here. Main contributors to the idea were Mervyn Maher and Neil Vincent. Neil then had the system prototyped by Charlie Johnson of Dive Developments, who also made my harness. Greg Ryan gregr@cs*.su*.oz*.au* I did not edit his original post to me. -- Roger Herring ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 09:48:45 +1000 From: Greg Ryan <gregr@st*.cs*.su*.oz*.au*> To: abcr@gn*.fd*.ne* Subject: Re: sidemounts I don't want to make any claims about being "experienced" (I've only done about 60 cave dives, with 17 of them being sidemounted), but thought you might be interested anyway. I've been using sidemounts in New South Wales sumps over the last couple of years. I started by taking my harness and diverite backplate, and stuffing the wings under the backplate, hanging the cylinders like stages, attached just above the nipple, and at the hip. The harness was a piece of webbing in the WKPP style, but with a chest strap at the time. This worked, but the wings (diverite standard old wings) tended to ride up at the side, and when inflated pulled the harness too tight. >From here I moved to another home made harness which allowed me to hang cylinders as with a wings harness, over which I wore a cut down Dacor BC jacket - an old one, with the backplate and harness taken out. After adding a crotch strap, this worked quite well, but it cluttered my front more than I liked. Through this time, those diving with me that wore drysuits (the bastards!) moved to a similar harness for sidemounts, but abandoned the BC, and as the locations we were working are reasonably shallow, this worked well, especially from the point of view of minimising what gear had to be transported through the cave to, and between, the sumps. Over this period we'd all talked about trying to incorporate the simple harness idea with some buoyancy device for us wetsuit divers and as a backup for those with drysuits, and so about a year ago we finally had our ideas made into a protoype, which after a couple of revisions has ended up with the following. Imagine a backplate replaced by a similarly shaped cordura bag which contains a BC bladder. The back bag has a waist strap and two straps which come over the shoulder and meet the bag at the waist strap - just like in a simple backplate harness. Cylinders are attached just above the nipple and on the hip (in fact in the one I have, just towards the back from the hip, so a little further back than where a D ring would be on a backplate harness waist strap. The unit has a crotch strap. The BC bladder in the bag has a standard inflator coming over the left shouder and an overpressure relief dump at the bottom. There is no chest strap. As the BC inflates it pushes out slightly from your back, so doesn't pull on the harness. The harness just has 4 D rings, and all clips are on the cylinders. What's that they say about a picture being worth a thousand words! This BC/harness has about 24lbs lift when comfortably inflated, and if you pump it right up (it pushes a bit into your back when you do this) you get over 30lbs. Bear in mind that where we're diving we tend to have a maximum depth at this stage of about 20m (typically < 10m), and use steel Faber 7 litre cylinders at 240 bar (about 55 cu ft each). I rig my cylinders with a hose clamp at the neck, and a hose clamp lower down, through which I thread a loop of tape, with a clip at each end of the tape. The tape gives me a handle. I use standard length HP hoses which loop under some bungee on the cylinder and come up to where the gauge is clipped at the tank neck. Short LP hoses come to regs which hang on a neck strap. In my case I use either a Scubapro G250 or an Apeks T50D (which I think is the Beauchat VX10 in the US???) as my right hand reg, and an Oceanic Omega on the left. The BC inflator runs off the left cylinder, back under my left arm, and over the shoulder to where it is bungeed along the corrugated BC hose. For the sort of shallow diving I'm doing this has proved the most comfortable and most successful rig. I especialy like the way it clears your front of any clutter. The rig is small and light, and lets me pack my diving kit into a single cave pack. There are still a couple of areas I have encountered where it still seems to give me a bit much of a vertical profile, and we are looking more at the British style 'hip' mounts for these constrictions. Greg Ryan gregr@cs*.su*.oz*.au*
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