Campana
Guest
by Vance Harlow, is a good book if you want to understand how your regulators work, the differences between different types and brands of regs, and even if you want to work on your own regs. It has diagrams and exploded views of a lot of regs, though it sometimes relies on generic pictures instead of having pictures of every single reg made. I used the generic picture of a balanced piston first stage to reassemble my Scubapro Mk 20 after O2 cleaning, only to discover that the exact picture was in the book later on. I was able to rebuild the reg, however, without any errors. There were no pictures, however, of my G500's or R380's.
Harlow is also the author of "The Oxygen Hacker's companion", a must have book that takes the mystery out of O2 cleaning, tank inspection and cleaning, and other topics having to do with breathing air and nitrox. He has also written one or two other books that I haven't read.
Harlow is knowledgable, if sometimes opinionated. He slams certain regs as hard to work on and finicky, and praises others for their simplicity and reliability.
Of course, if you are able to take a tech course to learn how to rebuild your brand of regulators, you probably should. This book, however, answered a lot of my questions and gave me a lot of "Ah-Hah, so that's how that works!" moments.
One of the coolest tests in the book is a simple test called "The water test". If you want to test the cracking pressure of your reg, and don't have the necessary guage, you can hook the reg to a tank, and lower it into a container of water, with the diaphram down and the reg level. A very sensitive reg will start to flow with only 1/2" or so of water over the diaphragm, while a less sensitive or maladjusted reg may take 2". Maybe this is a well known trick, but is wasn't to me. I went out and tested several second stages, to see if my subjective judgments about how easily they cracked were correct. Turns out they were. There are a lot of other neat facts and techniks in the book. Give it a try, if you want to.
You can order these books from Airspeed Press.
Harlow is also the author of "The Oxygen Hacker's companion", a must have book that takes the mystery out of O2 cleaning, tank inspection and cleaning, and other topics having to do with breathing air and nitrox. He has also written one or two other books that I haven't read.
Harlow is knowledgable, if sometimes opinionated. He slams certain regs as hard to work on and finicky, and praises others for their simplicity and reliability.
Of course, if you are able to take a tech course to learn how to rebuild your brand of regulators, you probably should. This book, however, answered a lot of my questions and gave me a lot of "Ah-Hah, so that's how that works!" moments.
One of the coolest tests in the book is a simple test called "The water test". If you want to test the cracking pressure of your reg, and don't have the necessary guage, you can hook the reg to a tank, and lower it into a container of water, with the diaphram down and the reg level. A very sensitive reg will start to flow with only 1/2" or so of water over the diaphragm, while a less sensitive or maladjusted reg may take 2". Maybe this is a well known trick, but is wasn't to me. I went out and tested several second stages, to see if my subjective judgments about how easily they cracked were correct. Turns out they were. There are a lot of other neat facts and techniks in the book. Give it a try, if you want to.
You can order these books from Airspeed Press.
