Aim: to integrate a double hose regulator into my existing gear configuration for everyday diving.
First of all a wee bit of an explanation of where I am coming from. Most of my diving these days consists of rocky shore dives mostly done solo or boat dives with the local dive shop usually with unknown buddy’s, so self-reliance has always been a big factor in my gear setups going back a long time. After messing around with big tanks, ponies, independent twins I have settled on my favourite tanks; two Faber steel 300 bar 7 litre tanks banded up with the usual modern isolating manifold. They give me heaps of air (~70cuft x 2 @ 300bar or ~55 cuft x 2 @ 232 bar ) nice and easy to handle on shore for those rocky entry’s, nice and balanced to dive with and have the ability to offer some redundancy. I was diving these tanks using an alloy backplate, wing and two Apeks regs. Now all was going well until my lifelong fascination with double hose regs finally got the better of me and I purchased a Pico DA, you know just to put in the display cabinet cuz its cool. Then I found VDH and discovered you can rebuild these things better than they ever were and realistically dive them, which I did with my DA along with its cousin my Spiro Mistral I was hooked.
Now as we all know the double hose doesn't always like to play nice with modern equipment, if you want to go all vintage then ok that’s great but it’s not for me, for solo diving in the ocean with modern steel tanks (negative) and using a modern (soft and compressible) wetsuit you need a wing, even though I don’t actually use it much. The best set up is the VDH back plate, with a small wing on a single tank, so I got one dived it works great. But I really wanted to use my little twin set with a double hose reg for every dive.
Problem 1; Manifold:
It has 300 bar DIN outlets on each side with the isolator in the middle so I would have to adapt a DH reg to DIN and mount it on one side, but then to get it into the correct position I would have to wear it down super low which then means the tanks bang my legs, I can't reach my valves and the reg is offset. Not good. I could go to an older style of manifold like the Sherwood but that would involve finding one and getting new bands made and forgoing the ability of 300 bar fills. Also I wanted to be able to get my tanks filled without grief, I get enough of that here just being a Kiwi let alone having weird tanks as well. I also didn't like the interference between the top of the wing and the DH reg when they are mounted on a central manifold.
Problem 2; back plate:
The modern backplate just doesn't work with the DH this has been discussed here heaps so no need to go into that, so it was either use no back plate just a harness like Luis uses or adapt the VDH back plate for a twin set.
Then it struck me what if I mount the DH reg directly to the back plate and remote feed it from another first stage then the manifold design would be immaterial, the regulator positioning would be independent of tank positioning meaning I could mount the tanks higher so I could reach the valves (bit of an issue for me as my shoulders suffer from a misspent youth crashing motorbikes) but still have the reg in the correct position, then the wing would then sit behind the DH. The independent first stage would then run the octi SPG and BCD feed.
HaHa so the fun begins, more to come.
here are the tanks (ok they could do with a paint)