This issue hits home with me. I have been diving for around 10 years and I have only had my regulators serviced twice by someone other than myself. The second technician that had them apart seemed to indicate that the first one didnt know what he was doing. This of course had the affect on me as to make me take them apart myself. By trade I am an instrumentation technician trained with all types of pneumatic equipment and had by this time with 12 or so years experience. It was still a very daunting task doing this WITHOUT any procedures or tech notes of any kind, as I for sure didnt want to have to take the sad remains back to that clown. What I found was that these are very very simple devices with designs that look like they could be abused something terrible and still work fine. (Remember this is coming from someone who works on pneumatic controls for a living.) All I could do was clean it replace the O-rings and put it back together and adjust the pressure. Some of my regulators are almost 10 years old and they still have the original HP seat.
I find this totally irresponsible for the industry to force me into taking care of this equipment without resources. How anyone can defend this with the litigation flag is beyond me, I think the opposite would be the case. What they are saying is that an open flow of information is bad, they know better than that. Its not about getting sued its about keeping the money in their club. There is a store in the Atlanta area that tried to sell me a battery for a dive computer for 33 bucks, all because he didnt think I read the manual and could cross reference the battery. I gave something like 8 dollars for it. He also wanted to TLAR (that looks about right) the O-ring, what a professional, thats what I have to do because I cant get the service manual. Well I digress back on target.
The only way I see to affect a change in the industry is, now I am as right wing as they come but I am going to start to lobby Congress to intercede. I have not quite figured out what I am going to ask them to do here but the LDSs drive the industry so I would want to go after them. Since this is such a dangerous sport that I cannot know what is inside my regulator maybe congress should look into what gives them the authority to certify someone to dive? I mean really, when it comes down to it they decided that they could certify themselves.
Anyway, I am off to start my campaign, I think Ill call it DSTI (Diver Safety Through Information). yes/no?
Phil
:doctor:
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