halocline
Contributor
The typical scenario, at least with SP DIN and yoke fittings, is very similar the diagram you posted. There is a threaded retainer that holds the DIN hand wheel in place; the retainer threads into the body of the 1st stage, and has a lip on the end to secure the wheel while allowing the use to turn the wheel freely. This retainer usually secures with an allen wrench, probably around 6mm. There's also a filter retainer (at least on the newer SP design and in your diagram) that holds the filter in place, and is secured with a smaller allen wrench, maybe 4mm. First you remove the filter retainer, filter, and spring, then you'll see the larger allen fitting to remove the retainer. There's typically a torque spec, for SP it's around 22 ft/lbs.
The yoke fitting replaces the DIN retainer with a yoke retainer, that threads into the first stage just like the DIN retainer, but instead of the small lip to retain the handwheel there's a big hex fitting cast into the retainer to retain the yoke and allow using either a socket or big open end wrench. This is usually about 1 inch. It's actually much more like a bolt than a 'nut'. Occasionally, you do see yokes that actually thread onto a stud of sorts and are held in place with a circlip, but that's a very different arrangement than what's on the diagram you posted.
The trick for you will be to find a yoke retainer that will fit EXACTLY like your DIN retainer does. You don't want to mess around with this, it's high pressure and you don't want any leaks or any chance of damaging the 1st stage. For a while, the SP (scubapro) retainers were every-so-often destroying MK20s, it's thought due to severe over-torquing by enthusiastic yet really dumb technicians. So SP recalled all MK20s and re-designed the yoke and DIN retainers to be more idiot proof. The point here is, even a very experienced design team for a huge regulator company didn't get it exactly right...although you could certainly blame the knuckle draggers that put so much extra torque on the retainers. So you'll want to either wait for HOG to come out with something, or maybe try the apeks idea although if you do that, you'll want to measure the retainer carefully, maybe with a micrometer, make sure it goes in very smoothly and torques to the correct spec easily. If I were doing something like this, I'd absolutely use a torque wrench and make sure everything fit perfectly before pressurizing the reg.
Sometimes cloned regs are not part-interchangeable. The MK5 was one of the most cloned 1st stages in history and none of us old SP geeks could find a non-SP turret retainer that fit, despite oceanic and TUSA both making clones. Go figure.
I suspect that HOG will come up with a yoke retainer at some point. They started life really marketing their products to tech divers, who usually use DIN connections. But, the regs are so reasonably priced that the recreational market could certainly significantly expand their sales, and having a yoke option would help considerably.
---------- Post Merged at 03:50 PM ---------- Previous Post was at 03:48 PM ----------
This comment is completely false and should be ignored; of course you're not 'downgrading' anything in the reg by switching the fitting from DIN to yoke or vice-versa. It's the same reg regardless.
