Posted by Kendall Raine on November 13, 2000 at 18:32:53:
In Reply to: Ah, more info, thanks... posted by JRM on November 13, 2000 at 16:36:03:
You still have the problem of compressability of your wet suit. As you go deeper, you get less lift out of your wet suit. The negative buoyancy of your tank only changes with consumption. The problem of "wet steel" therefore only compounds at depth. Try a simple experiment: dive wet steel in 100 fsw of water. Hover at 90fsw and dump all the gas out of your BC. How hard do you have to work to get out of it? Repeat the experiment with AL. That gives you a proxy for the amount of weight you'd need to ditch.
I've never tried purging my reg into my wet suit but several flaws jump out at me: 1) purging my regulator like this is a real good way to get a roaring free flow started making one problem into two, 2) my guess is the inflation gass will burp out your hood before it gives you much lift, and 3) the mechanical contortion of pulling my reg out of my mouth, peeling my thick glove down, shoving my second up my sleeve and holding the sleeve down low enough that the gas doesn't immediately vent to the sea seems convoluted. But, hey, give it shot. Just please remember that it's got to work at 100 fsw when you've just lost all your residual buoyancy and you're dropping like a rock 700 fsw to the bottom of Eurika, not in your swimming pool. I think you'll find that being able to dump ballast incrementally works a lot better.
As for changing to an elbow, that refers to the attachment point of your inflator to your BC. If I understood you, the dump valve at the top of your inflator hose failed. It does that. Change the dump valve for a plastic 90 degree joint (the elbow) which doesn't have the dump valve. No dump valve, no failure point.