Gas Analysis and Regulator Maintenance

[Slamfire]

The common practice is for gases to be personally analyzed by the diver sometime before doing a dive. By tradition, there is not much room for "trust me" analysis. I think regulator maintenance should be treated the same way.

I'm writing this thread, largely as a venting mechanism for a disappointment I had today. I was lead to believe that one of the 1st stages I use in my doubles was serviced around December 2010. It's a SP Mk10 that's been in my family for years. I gave it to somebody I trusted to convert it from yoke to DIN. When it came back to me converted he casually said he threw in a service kit and serviced the reg.

Just a few months ago I ordered a bunch of orings from McMaster Carr. Since I have an abundance of orings now, I thought I would just change the turret oring because the turret was feeling a little loose. So I thought I would just open up the Mk10 and swap the oring.

Problems started when I tried to unscrew the HP seat retainer. It was stuck. At first I thought it was overtorqued because it was supposed to have been serviced this last December. So I took it to the guy that had presumably serviced it. He created the problem, let's have him fix it. After some struggle he managed to release the retainer in my presence. The retainer was stuck to the body with corrosion, not overtorquing. He gave me some BS excuse of galvanic corrosion due to different brass alloys.

So I went back home and long story-short, the guts of the reg showed evidence that it hadn't been serviced in much longer than 6 months. I cleaned everything up really nice through an acid bath. Placed in a new HP seat, replaced all dynamic orings and some static ones with new ones and basically gave it a complete and proper service because it did need one.

This was the only reg in my inventory that I had not personally verified its innards. I trusted somebody else and thought the reg was in much better shape than what it actually was. This made me resolve that there will be no more "trust me" reg maintenance. From now on, I will be personally familiarized with my own regs, just as I get to personally analyze gas mixes.

Do you guys service your own regs?

 

[Vassilis Vlachopoulos]

I fully agree with your approach. Prior to getting into serious tec diving, I decided that I will be using regs from only two manufacturers and I took their "Service Technicien" course.
There are four benefits for me :
1. Fully understand how my regs actually operate.
2. Obtain the right to purchase spare parts / repair kits (from the local dealers in my country)
3. Have full control when performing regular servicing
4. Carry out emergency small repairs and have my regs available before next day's dive.

 

[Jim Lapenta]

I began my diving career with an Instructor/shop that allowed me to watch him service the student regs and regs for other customers. During my equipment maintenance course he showed me how to service my own Sherwood rental reg I had bought from him and he allowed me to service his reg under supervision of course. Then we took them to the pool and did some pool time with em.

When the opportunity came to take a factory course he had me, another DM, and a guy from a new shop all come in and take the course. We tore down and rebuilt 4 different regs and serviced our BC's. After that we all serviced regs thru the shop and I have been doing my own since then. I have manuals for a bunch of regs thanks to the frogkick site and have done a couple for friends and do all of mine.

While working for the shop I saw at least 10 reg sets that had been "recently serviced" by other shops come through. The owner would get pissed at the ineptness or outright carelessness and I also believe greed of these places. Corrosion, missing parts, hose protectors not pulled back, mud and sand in second stages, and even a small tear in one diaphragm. No idea how it got there but the shop that had "serviced" the reg two weeks before didn't catch it. Fortunately the reg owner had sense to take in it in the pool and saw immediately that something was wrong.

There were some things that the shop owner did that were not in line with my ideas and we parted company as far as working together but his attention to detail and the care he took with every reg that he did stuck with me and I adopted those same practices. Can I do a reg in lesstime than I do? Sure but why. It's not worth missing something small.

I am in the process of replacing my own regs with a brand that is more friendly to DIY guys. I now sell them as well. In a few months I will start selling off my older regs as it is becoming harder to get kits for them. More out of not wanting to deal with certain shops and the mfg will not sell me the kits directly even though I took their course. The BS reason of they only sell to shops nonsense.

The ones I will sell will have been fully serviced and ready to go. I can't offer free parts for life but I do guarantee that they are done right and I would dive them myself or allow any one I cared about to dive them also. I was recently accused in another thread of giving my GF a reg of less quality than the ones I use. Because it is a less expensive model. The mfg says it does not breathe as good as it's higher end regs.

Of course they will say that. They want to sell the more expensive one. But the fact is that I know how to adjust my regs and tune them. And it does breath as good as my higher end ones. It does not adjust to the point that it will almost free flow like the others but then it is not designed that way. If I set my adjustable regs knob to the recommended setting I can't tell the difference between the two.

But then this is also why I do my own. I set them and know they are right. I know what was replaced and what was adjusted and to what pressure. I treat my customers regs the same way as my own. My instructor instilled that in me. I will only buy new regs that I can service myself with no hassle about getting parts. I would only agree to sell a brand that allows divers to do that.

 

[Ste Wart]

You're spot on with your beliefs.

I had the same issue the first time I had my APEKs XTX 200s serviced a few years back. They guy 'claimed' that he had serviced and charged me accordingly. At the time I thought it was odd that I the cover for the environmental seal was still bulging, I assumed I would get an new one. Oh how naive I was. When you buy APEKS regs, they come with an APEKS branded seal, when you buy the service kit, there is a clear seal and a little service sticker to place beneath it on the piston. B**tard. Now no-one gets near my regs now.

The annoying thing was the service technican was a respected Tech Instructor Trainer, and apparently a thief.

 

[cbrich]

I was taught, there are 2 types of scuba techs; 1) a parts changer, 2) a technician. A parts changers only services regs for the money they get, I have personally seen a parts changer take 30 minutes to service a complete set of regs (1st stage, and 2 second stages.) This type of person will only replace o-rings, that at a minium should be replaced, and they over torque everything. Then you have a scuba technician, this type of person checks everything, whether it's the knife edge, o-ring lands, or smoothness of threaded parts. A technician takes their time do everything correctly.

I treat any reg that I work on as if it was my own personal reg.

 

[Slamfire]

What pisses me off is that this guy knows the kind of diving I do and how important it is for me to have reliable regs. More than once I've emailed him profiles of solo deco dives for comments. When I opened the reg the large piston head oring had cracks, the turret oring was considerably abraded out of its outer diameter, and the HP seat oring was all munched up. I would hate to have a piston head oring fail at depth.

Before I opened it, the reg looked fine externally. IP was good and there was no creep. The only warning sign was the loosely rotating turret. But even then there was no leakage whatsoever. I was fine with the loose turret because the guy had once confessed to me that when servicing Mk10's he would move the used large piston oring into the turret and put a new oring in the piston. I say I was fine, because at least I was made aware that my turret may have an old recycled oring in them. So I bought a couple of decades worth of oring for a few bucks out of Mcmaster Carr and made sure I had plenty of orings to change everything to new when I did the service. Orings are so cheap that it is not worth recycling them.

 

[cbrich]

Sounds like you need to tell this guy to go *uck it. You are right, O-rings are super cheap, even rebuild kits are cheap. I would say all o-rings are equally important. I replace every o-ring on my life support equipment every year, even the valve steam o-ring and tank neck o-ring. What else can you buy for $0.10? Anybody that recycles o-rings is nothing more than a parts changer, true technician replaces them.

This is like changing the oil in car without changing the oil filter, it's just stupid IMHO.

 

[rjack321]

Admitting to reusing Orings is a ginormous red flag.

I don't service my own regs, I have a boat, compressor and too many tanks & valves to keep up with. However I do have a good "technician". I don't send them in until they need it or its been a long time. If it ain't broke I don't fix it.

 

[DA Aquamaster]

There are some unfortunate realities in reg repair.

One is that in most locations there is not enough business to fully employ a reg tech who specialises in just that. In addition, most shops will service just about anything that comes in the door, usually trading for parts with other shops, but at times encountering situations where the tech may not be current on the reg, or in some extreme cases had no real training at all on that particular reg. You can argue that both ways - if the tech is the above described "parts changer" you have some serious issues whether he is certified on the reg or not and in particular if he/she has no access to a detailed dissasembly/assembly guide - or even a schematic. On the other hand if you have a real technician who takes a degree of care, he or she will have the required guide and will have sought assitance/direction from a tech who is familair with it - and with that in place a good outcome is likely as it is not rocket science.

Before people start having heart attacks over that, they need to consider the average "certification" course. Those tend to be one or two day events with limited hands on experience and even if hands on it tends to be one shot, working on one reg only of each model the company sells, and may not include any information non the other models that they sold but have discontinued. For most companies the idea is that most of the learning occurs in the shop with an experienced tech mentoring a newer one. It's an optimistic model - but the point is that a tech who is not officially certified on a specific reg might be better trained and be a better tech than one who is not <insert appropriate heart attack over the quality of tech certification here>. Either way that should inform you on the realities of techician training. Most of it is experiential and if a tech is not doing a few hundred regs per year, it's hard to maintain the required skill levels, especially when several brands and numerous models are involved and many shops just don't do that kind of volume.

Volume also equals money and the money is also not what you'd call great over the long term with a shop charging $25-30 per stage and the tech getting perhaps half of that. When a tech spends 60-90 minutes per reg, it means they will receive around $30-$45 per hour (although when a very dirty or fubar'd reg comes in the time escalates and the hourly wage gets very low, and most divers already whine about cost, so charging more is not usually an option.) It all sounds great until you consider travel time and cost to and from shops, cost of tools, training, etc and then self employment taxes, or in some cases the mixed blessing of keeping it on account and accepting gear in trade for service work. If you could work on 6-8 regs per day and do it five days a week year round it would be a decent income, but the reality is that people bring in their regs on a very seasonal basis and it tends to be feast or famine. You can't live on it so for most techs its a part time job or an add on to something else they do in the shop, which means reg repair is a weekend or evening occupation. That can create pressure for a tech to push regs out the door to meet demand in peak periods and/or can mean the tech is working tired on the last couple regs. The other option is the tech is a shop employee where the work is done in between being interupted by customers, which leads to a whole new set of issues. Neither is optimum. Another alternative is to send it off to a mail order service, but you can run into the same part swapping issues, never know who the individual tech is and will probably get a reg that breathes a bit harder to provide insurance agaisnt a free flow delvoping later after the seats break in (since retuning is now a major PITA rather than 5 minutes in the shop.

Annual service parts kits are also distressing as most do not include all of the o-rings that could be replaced and some don't include the ones that should be replaced. The Mk 10 is a good example - the piston head o-ring is an annually replaced part, while SP will tell you in training that you should replace the turret o-ring every 2-3 years. Nice to know, and probably valid, but it assumes you see the same reg every year and know its service history and that is often not the case. So in the real world you have to at a minimum remove the turret to inspect the o-ring for condition and if a tech is going to the trouble of doing that, they are far better off just replacing the damned thing as it is quicker and more reliable than inspecting it properly - which begs the question why the o-ring does not come in the Mk 10 annual service kit. SP would be far better off puttting it in the kit, charging another .10 for it and expecting/mandating the tech to replace it annually.

The Apeks external diaphragm issue is one that also cuts both ways. Apeks customers get cranky when they lose their branded seal, so ther eis some pressure to keep it if it is still in good condition. The whole internal and external diaphragm issue is also viewed differently in the US versus europe. In Europe, diaphragms are considered reusable parts that are replaced based on condition, while in the US we are told to replace them annually - probably for product liability reasons.

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Ultimately I service my own regs, but since I service regs all the time, and since I have a lot of regs between Marci and I to service, ours are usually last on the list and somewhat neglected in terms of a regular service interval. Consequently I am very thorough in pre-trip bench testing and in pre-dive checks including IP, and I usually find my self doing them after they fail a check. In recognition of that individual reality I also pack spare first and second stages to just swap out a suspect reg of it starts to slide mid trip.

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If the customer is around I am open to them coming and watching me service the reg, and I'll take that time to explain how it works to them as well as what is done in the service and why. Short of that, I'd suggest that any serious diver hook the reg up to a tank in the shop and test it before leaving to ensure it is leak free and breathes to the customer's satisfaction.

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I also think service models are changing. There are greater number so of companies that sell parts direct and for those who knwo that they are doing it's a good way to go. On the other hand I have regs come in for service that have obviously been gomered by someone and that creates a serious safety issue. Also with some fairly cheap but decent performing regs (Hog, as an example) it's becoming more common for a diver to buy a reg and dive it until it dies, then e-baying it and buying a new one rather than having it serviced. With the cost of factory parts kits, the mark up placed on them by shops and the labor costs, a service is a $100-$150 investment and if O2 cleaning is involved, the cost is closer to $200 (making a new low end deco reg a more cost effective option than servicing your old one.)

There are issues with the "dive it till it dies" approach - one being that you need to test the reg thoroughly prior to each dive to ensure the odds of it dying on that dive are acceptably low, and the diver has to be honest with himself when the performance starts to fall off and stop diving the reg. Learning to service it your self is a much better and safer option - but I know one well known Hog dealer that pushes the "buy a new one" approach since he is primarily in the business of selling regs, not servicing them.

 

[Ste Wart]

There are some unfortunate realities in reg repair.







The Apeks external diaphragm issue is one that also cuts both ways. Apeks customers get cranky when they lose their branded seal, so ther eis some pressure to keep it if it is still in good condition. The whole internal and external diaphragm issue is also viewed differently in the US versus europe. In Europe, diaphragms are considered reusable parts that are replaced based on condition, while in the US we are told to replace them annually - probably for product liability reasons.

Speaking as a European this is completely untrue. Diaphragms do not get re-used. In fact worn one's will rarely be able to re-seat after removal (as I found out when servicing my GF's Legends!!).