Rig/self weighting

Hello all,
Yes, I am just starting out, but I like the tech set up. I am currently working on my bouncy and weighting and have many questions. For what it's worth, I dive dry with HP steel tanks (singles only).

I keep reading "a balanced rig". Here is my question. Does this mean the BP/W or BP/W and Diver or BP/W and Diver separately balanced?

After watching this video (Frog Kick & Buoyancy Control skill - YouTube), the diver removed this doubles. I couldn't tell if he had a weight belt or harness, but his body didn't move (sink if wearing a weight belt)

Lets say that for what ever reason, a diver needed to ditch his BP/W, wouldn't you only want to have just enough weight on you (no gear, just dry suit) to be neutrally buoyant?

Now lets say, you do ditch the BP/W, wouldn't your gear sink?

Any help would be great on this matter to properly weigh my self and/or my BP/W, so looking for weighting configurations options.

KneeDeep:

Hello all,
Yes, I am just starting out, but I like the tech set up. I am currently working on my bouncy and weighting and have many questions. For what it's worth, I dive dry with HP steel tanks (singles only).
.

Click to expand...

Bouncy with steel tanks = painful

KneeDeep:

I keep reading "a balanced rig". Here is my question. Does this mean the BP/W or BP/W and Diver or BP/W and Diver separately balanced?

Click to expand...

For me, it's always meant the 'balance' of ditchable and non-ditchable negatively buoyant items, created to ensure that the diver can always ascend in the event of buoyancy failure.

Basically, can you get rid of enough 'negatively buoyant stuff', to enable you to swim the rig up and maintain your stops?

To arrive at such a calculation, you need to assess the buoyancy characteristics of every aspect of your configuration - coupled with the role that they play (critical/non-critical) at a given stage in the dive profile.

The concept of "balanced rig", as I was taught it, is that you can swim your rig up in the event of a catastrophic failure of buoyancy compensation. This is generally not going to be an issue for most single tank diving in a wetsuit (the exception being a large steel tank and a thick wetsuit and a deep dive). It CAN be an issue for single tank dry suit divers, because a dry suit and undergarments provides a large amount of lift, and you can lose a significant portion of it with a massive dry suit flood. But we plan for ONE major failure . . . it's highly unlikely you're going to have a massive dry suit flood AND lose your wing, and your wing should have enough lift to compensate for what you lost with the dry suit.

The wing should also have enough lift to be able to float your gear at the surface, so if you had to ditch your gear (and absent an unmanageable entanglement AND buddy loss, I can't figure out why you would need to do that) you should be able to send your gear up by inflating the wing.

The one issue people bring up is, if you had to take your gear OFF underwater to fix something (and where's your buddy?) and your rig is very negative and your self and exposure protection is very positive without it, it can be a logistical problem trying to hang onto your stuff and work with it, when you're trying to float away from it. Keeping some of your ballast on your body will mitigate that problem. But that has nothing to do with a balanced rig.

Thanks all,
This was a great help. Now for the fun part...to play around and find what works