mk10 the red washer

[Candiru]

Working on ebay mk10. The non-spec boot type. The insides are a rainbow of orings and the hp seat is pink. My mk10 service kit has the red plastic washer and after doing several searches on the board I am still unsure where it goes. Any help?

 

[Zung]

It seals the HP seat; it's a replacement for the 2-013 o-ring in the older kits, item #4 in brother couv's schematic.

 

[Candiru]

So it fits into a ledge in part 5 the body?

 

[Zung]

Exactly: drop straight in, press down with something dull, like a 10mm socket, and you're there.

 

[redacted]

It is part # 4 in the schematic which used to be a purple o-ring. That o-ring is a 1-013 (which can still be used rather than the washer) has an OD of 9/16 so use a socket with that OD to push it in place. I think I use a craftsman 13mm socket. I suspect SP made the change to the washer because the tech had to be pretty careful to get that o-ring properly seated. I purchased a Mk5 din that the owner's LDS had told him the leak through the hole in the seat retainer was unrepairable due to lack of parts. I was suspect but wanted the Mk5 din. Sure enough, the only problem was the purple o-ring was not seated properly in the groove. I offered to return the regulator but he had already bought another and was OK with it. I usually just go ahead and use the 013 o-ring and save the washers for a time when I have a problem getting the o-ring to seat.

Edit: Oops, make that a 10mm socket or 7/16. I set my caliper wrong when I checked.

 

[Slamfire]

I purchased a Mk5 din that the owner's LDS had told him the leak through the hole in the seat retainer was unrepairable due to lack of parts... I offered to return the regulator but he had already bought another and was OK with it.

Lack of parts!? Yeah, right. The last red washer I obtained came about when I found it misplaced in a dive shop. I picked it up, inspected it and saw that it was perfectly fine. I went over to the shop owner and gave it to him telling him it was misplaced. He grabbed it and tossed it in a wastebasket. I guess in his eyes this was the same as me giving him a candy wrapper or other minor litter I found in his store. I told him that if he was just going to throw it away, I would take it myself for my Mk10's. If that particular part were soooo rare and unobtainable, I bet you shop owners would not be tossing perfectly good ones into the garbage. Besides, as mentioned before, you can just use a -013 oring. It sounds like the classically dirty upsale strategy. "This reg is sooo old it is now discontinued. Parts are no longer available. It is an old 'unsafe' design that has now been displaced with much superior modern designs. Forget about repairing that dangerous piece of obsolete trash, just buy a whole new one. Afterall this is life support equipment. How much do you value your life?"

 

[redacted]

What is unclear (in my mind) is whether the shop was knowingly coercing the guy into a new regulator or if they really believed the seat retainer (where the bubble emerge from) had "failed". They are probably correct that Scubapro no longer stocks that seat retainer. Not a problem if you go to the junkyard knowing that all the early SP BP 1sts used a common seat retainer.

 

[Slamfire]

I guess I have less faith in fellow human beings. In my mind, if there is a leak in a certain region, my first suspect would be soft parts or seals that need to be changed routinely rather than the hard metal parts that are more or less permanent (you're not supposed to be changing those unless something major happened). It's easy and inexpensive to rule out soft part failures. The only reason I can think of for a departure of such logical problem solving path, is that solving the problem is not the prime motivation. After that is discarded, the prime motivation left over is profit. Why solve the original problem when you can get 10 times the profit by selling a new reg and you can do that in less time, with less labor than actually going in and working in the old reg.

I see it as simple divergence of interests, where the part with the least amount of knowledge ends up subordinating his best interest to the counterpart.

 

[Slamfire]

We've seen situations like this happen time and again. A dive shop once told me I should throw away a bcd that needed a new inflator hose and elbow because it looked old and it was not designed to take in aqualung inflator hoses. They proceeded to show me their brand new selection of modern "life sustaining" bcds. It really didn't matter that the plain jane elbows routinely used in BP/W fit perfectly fine. It didn't really matter that they where both OMS and Diverite dealers -- both carry the elbow I was looking for.

Just last week my cousin from California calls me asking for advice for her husband who wants to go back into diving after a loooong hiatus of more than 15 years. He wanted to get a simple, yet inexpensive analog depth gauge because he doesn't trust that his old gauges still work accurately. The LDS guy told him analog gauges are now obsolete and not available and proceeded to try to upsell him into a $850 computer with a lot of bells and whistles that he didn't even understand. So they called me to basically ask when and why did diving get so complicated. Is it really needed? It turns out that one of his old gauges is actually a capillary tube one which would be perfectly fine for the diving he wants to do (less than 60 ft). I also pointed him to some online places where he could get brand new analog gauges for about $80 -- again that's more than 10 times less that the shops recommendations.

 

[redacted]

A friend once said, "Never attribute to divisiveness that which can be explained by stupidity." And he didn't even know about LDSs.