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The argon bottle does not interfere with the stages on the left side. If it is on the right, where the light is, you can not reach behind you to untangle yourself. You can reach around the argon botle, or the light, but not both together. It appears that the bottle would get in the way of stages, but it does not in fact do so. Try putting on your tanks and have somebody hold the argon bottle on the right, and se how much range of motion you have lost. The bottle needs to be upside down ( so you can reach the valve easily ), it needs to be closer to the bottom of the tanks ( so that it is in the slipstream of the tank and not making its own pushwave, and so that the hose feeds freely below the edge of the wings when they blow up), and it needs to be stable so it does not set up its own drag by moving around. It is preferable to be able to release it yourself so that if you get keyed in a restriction or stuck on something, it is removeable, just like your light should be. Carmichael makes a great argon bottle holder, but I do not have one. I have two types - one for tight cave, and one for powercave. The tight cave uses hose clamps on the tank to slide smoothly through a restricition, as in Sally Ward, and the rest have webbing. I use black 1/8" bungee loops to keep the velcro secure, but they easily pull away if I try to remove the straps. The bottle needs to be a low pressure 2015 bottle with a 3000 burst disk. It needs to be permanently marked "argon", and it should never be filled on a compressor with air. These bottles will let go. The regulator needs a pressure relief valve so that you do not lose your hose or damage your drysuit valve in the event of a first stage failure. The intermediate pressure of the reg needs to be set way low , like 60 to 80 psi to keep the action of the inflator very slow ( you anticipate and take the pinch off ) and to buy you some time in the event that the drysuit valve sticks. The inflator hose heed to have a positive release, as in the kind supplied by DUI. For high rollers, commercial quick-dissconnects are the ticket. I hook everything in front of me and send it back between my legs, so can get my stuff from front or back, but if something gets between my second scooter and my legs, I need to be able to reach it. This is hard with 121'as, easy with 104's. For 121's, you pull your legs into tuck and get whatever the problem is. Obviously, the way we work, the buddy would solve problems for you, but thinking of all situations in advance makes this placement correct. We also like to have everyone place gear in an identical fashion so that in the event of a problem, the other divers can deal with it routinely, rather than trying to figure out some new convolution in the middle of an emergency. We do not want to have somebody disconnecting the wrong hose or turning of the wrong valve. On the rebreathers, Vinnny and JJ are using the argon bottle to hold up their switch blocks ( whc8ih are on the right), and you can not reach behind the 121's with the reabreather anyway. I keep mine on the left with the rebreather because I always do everything the same way so that in a pinch, I can react automaticly - mine stays on the left. I tried other placements but they all resulted in loss of range of motion or an inabiilty to reach the valve. I lay my switchblock hoses over my light and that holds them up. Vin and JJ have a bigger light so that will not work for them. I have a small nicad light which is sitting a couple of inches below the tanks so that the rebreather hoses can get behind it. However, with the rebreather diving we all watch each other so closely that by the time one discovers a problem, the other guy is already fixing it. The original argon rig from the Gavin days was according to the original Hogarthian thinking, which was that all gear should be easily replaceable at any dive store. Hoses were standeard lengths, etc. I changed that by asking the dive gear manufacturers to make what we need , and now you can buy everything we use right of of the shelf in most places. Dive Rite has all of our hose lengths as standard, for example. What started out as custom gear for me is now stock stuff anywhere. All of our gear decsions have been thouroughly thought all the way thorugh and we have tried all of the other combinations. Since we are diving a total system, the whole package must be considered dynamicly, not each piece in isolation. That is what the strokes do, and that is why we have the classic "portrait of a stroke" taped to the door of the van, as a reminder of what happens when personal prefrence is placed in front of team safety where people with no clue make life and death decisons over a bowl of Gainesville Red- if you live through it, it is becuase the gear failed and stopped the dive - see the Bible of the Stroke, for 129 examples of this. Jeff Bentley wrote: >I was jsut playing with my skeet thrower again and came up wtih this one: >From what I have seen most folks have the argon bottle on their left > side? > > What is the logic behind this? > -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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