victorzamora
Contributor
Taking apart a regulator, 1st, or 2nd stage, or both is a qualified and certified technician job, not to be carried out by the end-user.
I'm a qualified and certified technician AND an end-user of my regulators. Getting certified on a rebreather qualifies and certifies you to do the same.....disassemble, repair/refurb/clean/etc, and reassemble your own gear. It certifies you to do what you need to do to stay alive and then some.
If I go out and do what Dr Lecter's example provided.....is it not the same as mis-assembling your rebreather? I'm factory trained and certified. I didn't put my regs back together correctly, but HOW DARE they be designed in a way that I could screw it up???
The example is perfectly valid. Period. You're drawing imaginary distinctions because your logical position has no validity and hasn't from the start. Mfg's should do what they can to make it easier to assemble properly, but by no means should they be expected to make it impossible. The rebreather in question was "assembled" in a way that completely defied logic and even stretched the belief of people that own that unit. Proper training and care upon assembly should have been WAY more than enough to execute that dive safely, and it's been proven "safe" on tens of thousands of hours in the water. Period. This is not a killing machine, it's a person that killed themselves out of negligence.
So the dozens of regs I fixed and tuned before I was certified and "factory approved" are unsafe? How about the regs I've repaired/tuned/refurbed that I'm not certified for? This statement is just wrong. Before I took my reg repair class I knew more of regs and how to repair them than most current reg techs.DON'T TAKE APART 1ST AND/OR 2ND STAGES......Only factory approved technicians can do that safely.