Luis is not a fan of the original cotton harnesses and for overall diving I'd tend to agree with him. But if you really want to be a Manfish, diving a harness on a steel 72 or tripples with a single stage Mistral, minimal wetsuit and weights is a great way to dive and you really feel the connection with all your gear. About as close as we can come today to the experience of the first "aqua lung" divers. Try it.....You just might like it
I love the harness, I just hate the way it was attached directly to the cylinder back in the 50's. The attachment point was bad for the single tank. I use a plain harness with the backplate. With doubles (specially small doubles) the basic vintage harness and tank bands works great. It is one of my favorites.
I totally agree that with the simplicity and minimalistic sentiment.
You mean like this: V-TWIN - Beuchat
That is a very interesting first stage.
I kind of like the idea, but truly considering the history of reliability and actual possible failure modes for most first stages (mostly a leak or IP creep), I have to question the actual need. IMO, it is all about balancing the risks with the options.
This can be a lengthy discussion about risk assessment, probability of failure, MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure), and most important, actual consequences of failure. The actual analysis and evaluation of the consequences of failure can merit its own discussion.
BTW, in the late 70’s (maybe into the early 80’s) the company that made the At-Pak made a first stage with two independent balanced piston regulators. It actually went a step further and if you quit breathing from the primary first stage for a predetermined time period, it would automatically inflate your BC to bring you to the surface. I don’t think that was a good idea, but I will give them credit for thinking ”out of the box”.
They did it is called the Scubapro MK-7. You can find them cheap on eBay and VDH sells the rebuild kits.
Low air pressure alarms are available again. They are now integrated into some “air integrated” dive computers. I don’t know if you can program into them custom ring-tones, but give it time… someone will do it.
Note: I like the Mk-7 in some weird kind of way...
It is interesting to notice that history repeats itself, in one way or another.
Some may notice that I will always bring stuff from the past when we are actually talking about the future of scuba gear. I don’t have a crystal ball to look at the future, but looking at the past we can look at trends, we can study what has already being tried and it either didn’t work or it was not accepted at the time for a number of reasons, etc. Studying the past (for gear, etc.) may help us from making the same mistakes and can teach us what may work.
I am also not restricting my posts to just the regulator, because I feel that the entire scuba kit should play together as a system. The original “aqua-lung” was not just the regulator, it was the complete kit including tank and harness.
