Netboy:
My 13-year-old son and I just got certified, so this opinion is clearly from a newbie with little comparison. FWIW:
I was rather uncomfortable with the standard jacket style BC in the pool sessions. A back-inflation style jacket was a bit better, but still tended to come up around my neck sometimes. Integrated weights were better than a belt, but still I felt uncomfortable with the setup. Reading this board about the backplate and wings, and being taken by the apparent logic of the DIR approach (I'm an engineer and like things to be logical), I ordered 27# Halcyon wings from EE and standard SST backplates from Fred Tagge. I also got his harness kits and 2-piece STA's for both of us (my son is at the top end of the height range for Fred's short plate pattern). We spent one evening filing and sanding the edges of the plates and STA brackets. We opted not to pay the extra $ for Fred to do it, but that probably would have been the wiser course. The as-cut edges were not burred, but they were perfectly square and almost sharp, so you need to do something to smooth them a bit. We used the www links we found here to see pictures and instructions for the harness webbing. We used a 2 3/8" bicycle inner tube to cut pieces that fit over the webbing to protect it from the slots in the plate, and also keep it from slipping (this idea -- from Fred -- works great, BTW). We adjusted everything in the living room with our wetsuits on, and got the fit just right.
We just got back from our OWC dives (plus more on our own) in Bonaire. Before going in the water with the new backplate rigs, I showed them to the instructor and he inspected everything and we discussed weighting. With a 3-mm full suit, I used 10 lbs and my son ended up with 6 lbs, using standard weight belts with slotted weights. We both found the weight belts were a bit tricky to don, as they tended to hang up on the bottom tail of the wing oval (not to mention on the D ring and knife pocket on the left waist belt). But it worked fine. Our instructor suggested we try the Halcyon integrated weight pockets, so I might do that for a dive or so and see how it works.
Here's my result-- I'm very happy with the feel of the bp/harness in the water. I honestly did "forget it was there", compared to my experience with the full jacket. I also found it was much easier to don because there are fewer choices of where to put your hands to get into it (I always found the jacket seemed to have several extra places to stick your second arm when donning, which were not the right place!). I also felt totally unencumbered in the water. I felt very neutral as far as attitude and could point up, level, or down with no effort. On the surface, the wings kept me up just fine, and very easy to float on my back compared to the standard jacket BC, but I found the top of the wing oval did touch the back of my head while swimming face down, preventing me from lifting my head very far out of the water to take a glance at things on the surface while snorkeling. (I would consider this a minor annoyance unless you're swimming more than 20 minutes or so). Not sure if I can prevent that by lowering the unit on my back or not. Also, one time I overtightened the waist belt, and while snorkeling had a confined feeling in my chest, but it went away when I loosened it a bit (duh!).
Out of the water, the rig was also quite comfortable, with little or no sway as we picked our way over the rocks exiting the water.
A fringe benefit was being able to disassemble the wings from the plates to pack both rigs really compactly into a single small hardside suitcase.
Personally, I'd like to thank the members of this board for providing info I otherwise would not have known from my LDS. Also thanks to Fred for making a top quality product at a reasonable price.
So please again take my experience FWIW, as I have little comparisons to make, but I thought since I'm also new to the backplate this might be useful info for you.
Regards,
Peter
