Tec Side-mount Bungee's

[ajtoady]

I use the ring connections or hard attachment, when I side mount. I also do the stride entry a good bit. I found the key to easy ring connecting is use a smaller bungee. Once in the water my tanks, 100 Cu Ft Faber steels, retract right into place. Before entry they hang along my side a little in front. When clipped up on the tail, which I do in water, the reduced weight of the tank or buoyancy characteristics, allows the bungees to work. This however is how I prefer to do it and may not please all. Check out the Dive Rite site, Lamar shows some good pointers.

 

[stretchthepenn]

For sms100 single binge the wrap around do you do valves up or down? I do valves up and I tried to just stretch it over the valve but it slides off. So I had to unclip it an wrap.

Neither. If you position your tank cambands/bottom clips precisely, you can rotate the tanks so that the valve handles go sideways. This positioning is easier if you have mirrored valves, but basically, the left tank's bottom clip is at 7 o'clock (looking down, with the valve aperture at 6 o'clock) and the right tank's bottom clip is at 5 o'clock. Once I'm clipped in, the left-side valve handle points to my left; the right-side valve handle points to my right. The bungees slip over the handles and lock everything in position.

The other propblem is I wanted a hard connection at the neck so I can walk and giant stride with tanks.

A short paracord choker with a boltsnap takes care of this issue. You can clip in both tanks on top, put a forearm across the tank tops, and giant-stride in. Once you're in the water, you can clip in on the bottom and slide the bungees over your tank handles.

 

[kelemvor]

I use the diverite rings as I'm using a diverite nomad XT. The tanks are attached by two bolt snaps. One to an attachment point near my butt, the other to a chest d-ring. The ring bungee is strictly used to manage positioning of the tanks, and is basically a third attachment. Without the ring, the tanks will dangle a bit and you'll look like a mess in the water, but they aren't going anywhere. The ring bungees just position things nice and tight.

I did once test and find that the ring will hold the tanks its-self. Therefore, I guess I could skip the top chest clipped boltsnap but I don't see any reason to do deviate from how I was trained.

I've done giant strides with sidemounted Worthington lp108's (very heavy tanks) a number of times when I was learning sidemount. It was never an issue. Climbing back onto the ladder took a little effort though . Now that I'm done learning, I don't sidemount from boats any more.

I've never used any other sidemount system so I can't really compare.