Equipment Servicing

[sambolino44]

...I started the same way most adolescent males learn how things work - I took gear apart to see how it was put together, then reassembled it (generally, without leftover parts)...

Without leftover parts? Well, then, you really weren't like MOST adolescent males after all, were you?

 

[mudhole]

Is that this information (reg self servicing) is treated much like a National Security Issue... you have to be sponsored/affiliated with a shop to recieve this sacred knowledge... cant just have Anyone be able to do their Own work! (and skip out on those "servicing" fees)

Ah, the good old days when valve seats and all the other parts were good old rubber. You could walk into any dive shop and buy parts by the handfuls, you had to the rate at which they wore out.

Then came the sharks. . . not the clean wet ones. The slimy smelly ones called lawyers. If a diver is run over on the highway, with dive gear in the trunk, the smelly ones will sue if the dimple for the "official" valve seat isn't there. Sue all the local dive shops for unsafe repair work.

Dive equipment hasn't changed much since the time of Cousteau. But, there are refinements in the basic designs and better fitting parts. Most people don't have any mechanical ability, they should not touch a hammer. . . Some people can repair watches, cars, regulators without much trouble. Fine tuning a regulator without some equipment is a little harder.

Your local friends at a dive shop could lose their business if they sell you parts. And they could lose their business if they put a Aqualung part in a ScubaPro regulator, and Skylab falls on the diver. These slimy sharks say they are making you safer, while they make themselves richer.

 

[herman]

If that were the case it would not be quite as bad....so far, I have not heard of a single lawsuit. Unless I am badly wrong, this is simply a BS excuse, profit is the real reason. If selling parts were such a dangerous legal problem you would not be able to buy 90% of the car part you do. Besides, really, which is more likely to be a successful lawsuit - one against a shop that rebuilds a reg that fails or one against a shop who sold good parts to a diver who did the service himself .

 

[USFishin]

If you're a technical person that is meticulous and enjoys working on things then you should have no problem servicing your own regulators. Granted you have the service manuals and parts. It's a good idea to start by getting Vance Harlow's book on reg repair. Read through it and gain the basic knowledge of how they work and some basic repair techniques that apply to all regulators. Then it's time to break out the service manual and work on your own gear.

My friend and I are engineers and very meticulous. We just serviced all of our Oceanic regulators (1st and 2nd stages). Going through our first sets took a while because we were still learning as we were diassembling/resassembling. After the first set the subsequent sets were a piece of cake. I now have the hang of making all of the adjustments, etc.

It's nice to have the knowledge you gain by working on your own gear because if you ever need to adjust it while you're out on a trip you know what you're doing and what to adjust. It's also nice knowing that it was done right and every part was thoroughly cleaned and the proper parts were replaced. We've had issues with a shop supposedly rebuilding a regulator and you open it up and has corosion inside. I feel a lot better about my gear now after doing it myself.

 

[tfsails]

The problem will be getting parts.

So, use Dive Rite regulators! They post the service manual online and sell parts kits to end users.

The cost of regulator maintenance isn't much of an issue. The problem is the quality of the service. If you get them back and they start free-flowing after a few minutes of use, you can be certain they weren't cycled properly after reassembly. Who says the LDS techs are any good? That they have taken a course lasting an entire half-day doesn't instill confidence.

Richard

As a working service technician who has a background fixing airplanes (MUCH more complicated than regulators), I feel compelled to defend service quality.

Second stage tuning is a combination of science and black art. The technician is walking a fine line between too tight (where if feels like you're trying to suck a golf ball through a garden hose) and too loose (where the reg free-flows) when he adjusts the reg. Sometimes the poppet seat develops an indentation over time (a "set") that wasn't there when the reg left the shop. This can cause a slight free-flow. I know that EVERY reg I work on gets AT LEAST 50 breathing cycles on it before I begin to tune it. This is an effort to create the "set" in the poppet so the reg is trouble-free to the owner. Some adjustable regs' manuals call for slight free-flows when the adjustment knob is fully loose.

I will never turn out a reg that I wouldn't dive with. Never have, never will. Neither will my sidekick who also fixed airplanes in another life. I have also turned out regs that had a slight free-flow when the customer dove with it the first time. Sometimes this just happens, especially with certain brands. We fixed them immediately and for free when we found out. BTW, I would and do service my own reg, but I wouldn't before I learned how to work on them.

Regulator technicians are just like auto mechanics--you have good ones, bad ones, incompetent ones, and ones who shouldn't even look at regs, much less touch them. It is up to the individual to determine by any means possible how good his service tech is. As they used to say in Rome, caveat emptor.

There--I'm off my soap box now.