Difficulty of vintage diving

[spectrum]

Is diving vintage gear dificult or is it all in the set-up? I'm thinking about bouyancy. Since there is no BC you are what you are except for the tank geting lighter as air is consumed. So that it's not a fight to get down I assume you enter the water negative and become neutral to positive towards the end. What if you want to ascend early? is it a struggle? Were the early wetsuits bouyant like todays neoprene? Sometimes they look more like plain rubber exposure protection. Is controling lung volume a significant part of the art?

Pete

 

[justleesa]

I am not the big expert as I have only done a few shallow vintage dives. But from my meager experience I can say that I had no trouble with my bouyancy. In total I needed less weight than usual and was able to control everything via lung. The last dive we came back early because my buddies camera flooded, I had twin 38's with about 1200PSI left, and I had no trouble getting back to the surface. To sum it up it less restrictive, quite easy to regulate and great to leave the bubbles behind me, but I did want to stay closer than usual to my buddy

 

[DA Aquamaster]

If you are not using an exposure suit, there is really very little bouyancy change except for the weight of the air lost from the tank during the dive. This leaves you 4-5 pounds heavy at the beginning of the dive with a steel 72 or twin 38's but most people can swim that extra weight around ok.

With a thin exposure suit or a shorty, there is some compression and bouyancy loss as you go deeper and if you are using a full 7mm suit the negative bouiyancy at depth can be substantial. The negative bouyancy from the compressed suit combined with the 4-5 pounds negative bouyancy needed at the beginning of the dive to keep you neutral with an emnpty tank at the end of the dive can make it difficult to swim off the bottom. Scuba divers in the pre-BC era, with NO exceptions, were very good swimmers with a strong set of legs.

But the introduction of the horse collar BC made life easier as it allowed true neutral bouyancy to be maintained. When vintage diving, a horse collar makes life easier and you have a couple of options for BC inflation.

I prefer a DW Mistral double hose reg and this model does not have a hookah port, so manual inflation is the only option with most horse collars. Normal inflators work but you can also still find vintage manual inflators. With these pressing against the mouthpiece opens the valve and lets you exhale into the BC. This of course requires removal of the regulator mouthpiece which then needs to be cleared before you can breath again. Since you have to retain enough air to clear the reg and they don't have a purge button it works best if you don't exhale all of your last breath into the BC.

Very early double hose regs did not use check valves in the mouthpieces so it was possible to entirely flood both hoses if your technique was bad and a roll to the left was then needed to clear the inhalation side of the system. Later models with check valves in the mouthpiece for the most part prevent water from entering the inhaltion side and are much easier to clear with only a small exhalation normally needed to clear the water from the mouthpiece. They make things like BC inflation and buddy breathing a lot easier.

With a hookah port equipped reg you can run an inflator hose off the hookah port and inflate the BC like you would with modern equipment. You can also still find vintage horse collar BC's that use a small tank integrated with the BC to fill the BC and these function pretty much the same way as a modern BC.

With vintage equipment proper weighting is not just a nice skill to have but is in fact a requirement as the effects and complications of overweighting are magnified compared to modern equipment even if a BC is used.

Controlling lung volume is a big part of the art with vintage equipment, but then it is also still a big part of the art with modern equipment it's just that many divers (those with poor to mediocre bouyancy control) are unaware of this.

Despite its quirks and challenges, vintage diving is a lot of fun and the minimal equipment leads to relatively low weight and much greater streamlining compared to modern scuba equipment. The reduced mass and exponentially lower hydrodynamic drag provide a feeling of freedom, speed and manuverability in the water that most modern scuba divers will never experience.

 

[Rick Murchison]

In our part of he world we were summertime divers. A 72, single hose reg (still have my trusty Conshelf), mask & fins. In my case I needed no weightbelt at all; some of the guys carried a few pounds.
Since we didn't dive wetsuits the only change in buoyancy was air use, and that could be easily compensated with breathing patterns.
I still dive the old rig from time to time. The only difference is that now I have to do it in fresh water if I want to go without a weightbelt...
Rick

 

[hecker-the-wrecker]

I have talked to my dad about his experences diving before technology. When figuring out buoyancy, you should be just about neutral at surface, taking a little effort to get under. This way when you start running low on air, it will naturally start to lift you to the surface. He said the idea is, if you are out of air, it should be impossible to break the surface and go under.( this is how they knew the tank was low without a guage! ) Seems interesting, but I like to know how much air I have!!

 

[John C. Ratliff]

I have talked to my dad about his experences diving before technology. When figuring out buoyancy, you should be just about neutral at surface, taking a little effort to get under. This way when you start running low on air, it will naturally start to lift you to the surface. He said the idea is, if you are out of air, it should be impossible to break the surface and go under.( this is how they knew the tank was low without a guage! ) Seems interesting, but I like to know how much air I have!!

Chris,

Your Dad is right, if you are not wearing an exposure suit.

DA Aquamaster has a very good post above, and all that he stated is correct.

I would only add that with a wet suit, we weighted ourselves for the depth we were going to, which may mean that we started out on the surface a bit light (buoyant). One alternatative I used at times in a fresh water lake was to remove my weight belt totally and put it onto a look in an anchor line, swim around weightless (the wet suit at about 30 feet in frosh water has lost almost all its buoyancy). When I came to the ascent, I would go up the anchor line, and put my weight belt back on before surfacing.

If you are using a dry suit (Aquala, for instance), it could always be inflated with some air. This was either through the hood (through the mask skirt), or by putting on an inflator. I did this, and will include one photo of that suit from 1974 in this post. Note that in the photo, I'm using a double hose regulator (AMF Trieste II), with an SPG and an octopus. I also have an oral inflation/deflation hose I put into the dry suit, and a power inflator. On top of that, I was also wearing a Dacor CO2 vest.

We played around with a lot of different BC concepts in the 1970s. I had a wet suit with a bladder built into it (an inverted "U" in the back of the suit) built by Bill Herter. At first, it was oral inflation, and then Bill Herter (who designed and built some of the first BCs) went to power inflation. Bill built a vest out of neoprene, and I demonstrated it at IQ6 (I believe) in 1974. In 1978, Scubapro (who was there) came out with their "Stabilizing Jacket." Bill built me a custom wet suit about then with probably the best BC concept ever for a wet suit. It was a suit with the whole back of it as a sandwich of 1/8 inch neoprene, becoming a bladder built into the back of the wet suit. It was warm, and very streamlined--and very labor intensive. Bill Herter, "Deep Sea Bill" from Newport, Oregon, retired in the late 1970s, somewhat bitter for not getting credit for developing many BC designs. His retirement card said, "Bill Herter, dive shop owner, retired; wet suit designer, retired; commercial diver, retired; Bill Herter, just plain tired."

I think the bottom line here is that you don't have to dive without buoyance compensation devices to be diving vintage equipment (double hose regs).

SeaRat

 

[scubapro50]

hey .... even I wore a CO2 vest while diving with my doublehose ........... you can still find them on E Bay sometimes. When I do use my Dacor R-4 I wear a horsecoller vest that can be manualy inflated or in case of an emergency it has a 18grm. CO2 inflator in the pocket .... Note : CO2 inflators should only be used while on top of the water because of the rapid uncontrolled oneway trip to the surface.

 

[hecker-the-wrecker]

Chris,

Your Dad is right, if you are not wearing an exposure suit.
He was,1/8 inch wetsuit. I don't know much about "vintage diving" as far as equipment dates e.t.c, but he told me his tank was hydro'd in 1963, and he dove into the 70's.(still with no b.c. or s.p.g.) He just chuckled about the drysuit, the only drysuits at that time where full commercial suits with helmets. Maybe there should be another class of diving, "ancient"??? :diver:

 

[DA Aquamaster]

No SPG...

I recently aquired a banjo fitting and a very nice Seaview SPG, so I am going to go high tech with my vintage diving and actually use an SPG. Assuming I can find a long yoke to swap with the short one on one of my late 50's to early 60's USD double hose regs.

 

[junior diver]

I know someone who dives regularly with a backplate, weightbelt, J-valve tank, double hose and exposure suit nothing else (apart from mask and fins of course). If he wants to dive a wreck he drops weight down goes down, attaches the extra weight to himself and walks around on it. He knows hes out of air by the tank running out, then he pulls a cord on the valve and he has some extra air, if he pulls the string by accident throughout the dive, he goes up 10 feet and he has two more breaths. He started diving in the 70's and never caught up with the technology.