Please, define your perfect Sidemount gear

[Darghu]

As suggested by @DevonDiver
GUE and Sidemount position ?

I would like to askwhat would be your perfect (acceptable pro's and con's) sidemount gear.
if you have to define the perfect Sidemount rig., how would it look like?
What is missing in today market?
What kind of things should be improve?

 

[Dave Bevan]

Depends what you want to use it for really. Certainly cold water/warm water. Caves or Open Water. Or are you looking for something to do all?

 

[Darghu]

Something to do all but also consider something specific. For example, I'll not bring a drysuit for warm (27C) water.

 

[RainPilot]

The cold / warm issue is only tangentially related to the exposure protection. In areas where it’s cold, generally we need a fair bit of lead. The preference there is to use steel tanks to minimise the dry weight of the rig.

This will in turn affect the buoyancy characteristics of the tanks ie steel stays negative so attached to a rail on a butt plate vs aluminium which becomes positive requiring some method of adjustment for trim. Usually this takes the form of two sets of d rings on each side of the waist belt or a sliding attachment point.

If it’s open water ie no overhead then there can be a lot more flexibility wrt hose lengths since there is no need to exit with a buddy single file. In OW I dive 2 x 40” hoses, some use even shorter, most are using a variation of the DIR hose setup ie a 7’ hose and a shorter bungeed backup

The questions you need to ask are, as Dave said:
Type of tanks (ie cold or warm)
Solo / buddy / team (affects hose length options)
Overhead or not? (Hose length and bladder construction)
Max number of tanks (will affect lift requirements)


These will get you started on the right track.

 

[MichaelMc]

@RainPilot, When you say steels stay negative, are you mostly talking HP steels? And not things like LP80 (and maybe LP50) which are almost close to AL80 range on empty buoyancy?

 

[northernone]

I'm happy with a pair of short hose conshelfs regs, button gauges, hose clamps and a msr style bladder with 1" webbing.

Pros: it's tiny to travel with, inexpensive to replace and durable in use. Cons: not particularly clean hose routing, scares some divers and has single 22lb lift.

A pair of future technology tiny rebreathers would be what's missing in today's market so I can quit hauling tanks.

Regards,
Cameron

 

[Darghu]

I will rent tanks when I should take a plane.
For local diving (English Channel/Mediteranean sea) I will travel in car instead of plane.
For buoyancy needs do you recommand to buy both steel / alu tanks ? (also as I live in Europe, I'll need authorized EU tanks)

Mostly cold water with drysuit (CaveDiving but I guess I'll rent tanks as I will need to take a plane)
Solo / buddy / team All of that..
At the beginning o Overhead but later Yes.

 

[MichaelMc]

You might still need to narrow the scope. It seems you mostly answered 'yes all that' to the dive environment question.

Barring that, the answer might be a box with the top 8 systems in it, or auto ballasting 10,000 psi tanks the size of LP50s and a breadbox size booster. But I'm not sure that either of those answers is very helpful.

 

[RainPilot]

@RainPilot, When you say steels stay negative, are you mostly talking HP steels? And not things like LP80 (and maybe LP50) which are almost close to AL80 range on empty buoyancy?

I have zero experience of the LP tanks. In the civilised world we use 207, 232 or 300 bar tanks. All the steels are negative throughout. Since the OP is in France I thought I’d avoid muddying the waters.

To the OP point, if you are using both Al and steel, then a butt plate with rails is not for you. Ie you can use steels with a waist d ring system but Al tanks don’t work well with the rail.

 

[MichaelMc]

I have zero experience of the LP tanks. In the civilised world we use 207, 232 or 300 bar tanks. All the steels are negative throughout. Since the OP is in France I thought I’d avoid muddying the waters.

Apologies. Good observation. We tried to go to that new fangled metric thing in the 80's I think. Some how we haven't managed it yet. Maybe we think it will not catch on.

OP, forget any mention of LP tanks mucking the issue. (That could be a limited metro-centric view of the world, but we can let that pass.)