In Reply to: Re: Have Faith... posted by Don on November 26, 2006 at 23:06:24:

All of my painted aluminum 80's look horrible after about 6 months. This one was not painted or finished, had the look of a steel tank, and was holding up much better.

I'm not concerned about the weighting. I've been using aluminum tanks for 17 years and I'm weighted the way that I need to be. None of this is new to me and I definitely don't need advice on how to weight myself for one. The hydro with the stuff from the tumble left inside of it was done at a tech dive store that I had made a special very long trip to get to.

Where I live, Sport Chalet, a half hour round trip drive, is the LDS. My only other real choice is Pacific Wilderness. When I've made my 2+ hour round trip haul to the beach I can sometimes stop there, but it is not convenient. Any other dive store is a 2+ hour round trip, just to visit a dive store and I don't have that kind of time to spend on a shopping trip and I'm certainly not going to do it for air fills.

I've had some good experiences at Sport Chalet. I'm sure that Sport Chalet is not happy about the missing tank and I wasn't going to mention the store in my post. At least one person there knows that I'm a frequent poster on the internet and I suspect they are quietly saying "sheezzee" over this. I will say that their scuba staff seems to rotate a lot and most people there don't know me or my heavy diving activity from the next guy so I do get treated exactly like everyone else.