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On Sat, 23 Oct 1999, Dave Sutton wrote: > RE: catastrophic zipper failures on drysuits: > >I have, and in only 5 years of diving. > > What make zipper? All are not equal. Viking uses the NASA > spec stuff, there are many unsatisfactory imitations. Don't know. Immaterial, actually. Kinda puts your previous assertion that ALL drysuit zippers are the SAME as those used by NASA in its proper light. They may be the same TYPE of zipper, they certainly are not the SAME zipper. This particular failure may have been due to improper maintenance, it may have been closed incorrectly. There are other good ways to flood a drysuit, too. A neck seal failure (more likely in latex than neoprene). A tear from contact with the wreck in surge. A seam letting loose. Whatever. I've seen all of these. Luckily, I've only had very minor leaks in my suits. I'm utterly anal about maintaining my gear, but that doesn't mean it can't happen to me. > Just curious, not for any sinister reason, but how many drysuit dives to > you have? Lots of questions are answered with a few hands-on experiences. Dunno for sure without consulting my logbook. Just closing in on 300 dives total, spread over NJ wrecks, Florida caves and Caribbean reefs. Maybe around 200 are in drysuit, and with doubles. Considering the comparatively small number of exposures to drysuit diving conditions, I'm really suprised that the number of failures I have seen bests your count. Maybe everyone you dive near is as anal about gear maintenance as can be, and the converse true in my case. Shrug. > >You must be pretty heavy, and that swim would take a tremendous amount of > >effort! Not a good thing to do at the end of a long dive with a > >significant deco obligation IMO. > > I have additional -mass- but that does not equate to being heavy insofar > as bouyancy is concerned. Double Fabers (neutral empty) with about 100cf of air: 7.8 pounds Manifold: 2 pounds Bands: 1 pound Regulators: 3 pounds Aluminum backplate: 1 pound I think your rig includes these items. That's around 15 pounds. I don't know about your weights, fins, reel, and other stuff. If you're using a steel backplate, add 5 pounds. Some of what you carry is ditchable, so in any case you have at least this much to deal with, unless you ditch your rig as well. Add another 7.8 pounds with full cylinders at 200cf. You start your dive at about -23 pounds MINIMUM, all of it to be compensated for with your drysuit. I've tried using my drysuit this way, and found the amount of gas in the suit too large to manage. My neck seal kept burping ... so I use my BC. I do know it works well enough to get my backside to the surface, though, if my BC fails. > Add it all up and it is -all- neutral of maybe a bit positive in the > water. See above, we seem to disagree. Show me how. What do you carry that is +15 or more? > You might be interested in "Daves 10 rules of Aeronautical Success" > which applies to diving too: > > Proper Prior Preflight Planning & Preparation > Prevents Piss Poor Post-takeoff Performance. Generic form: Proper Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance. Heard it a long time ago, and abide by it religiously. > >Why don't you use the BC all the time? What advantage is there in *not* > >having it? > > Less hoses. Less crap. Lower drag. Not worth it in most cases. I think we'll just have to settle for disagreement on this issue. I don't think the amount of drag added by a wing type BC is all that significant, especially when balanced against the advantages using one brings. -- Art Greenberg artg@ec*.ne* -- Send mail for the `techdiver' mailing list to `techdiver@aquanaut.com'. Send subscribe/unsubscribe requests to `techdiver-request@aquanaut.com'.
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