O-ring blew up after 3 dives - bad luck or I messed up?

[BoltSnap]

Wait, am I missing something?
HP "pushes through" a lot of air, LP pushes through a very low flow of air, no?
If my LP port fails it would be equivalent to having a free flowing regulator, which leaves me a lot of time to empty a tank.
But HP should be much faster to empty the tank no? What you describe seems to be the opposite.

Nope, the other way around: If a LP hose ruptures, it will empty a full tank in around 2 minutes when a HP hose rupture will take 15 - 20 minutes for the air to drain from a full tank (80cuft).

 

[RIHappyDiver]

This is a tremendous source for things that you can learn about and check on a regular basis Regulator Inspection and Checklist (Rev-8)

Erik

 

[broncobowsher]

When you take off the high pressure hose and look into the regulator. There is a tiny little hole in the regulator for the high pressure air passage. Although the pressure is high, the hole is so small it takes a long time to leak out.

The low pressure has to be able to give a burst of air as fast as you can inhale. Those are the high flow ports.

If you made the high pressure port as large as the low pressure port, you could empty the tank is seconds. I would say the valve would be what slows it down. That would be an unsafe regulator. So nobody does that.

 

[SlugLife]

Number one, as you suggested, is overtightening it. The oring is what makes the seal, and really only needs to be hand tightened then snubbed no more than ⅛ of a turn.

I'd like to add some emphasis on tightening it past hand-tight. It doesn't need to be much, the roughly 1/8th turn is probably good. (I hand-tighten, and then just a small extra tighten using a tool).

If only hand-right, or even a strong hand-tight, you risk having an incident like this one....

Lost Improperly Tightened 2nd-Stage Regulator

This is embarrassing, my fault, and happened a little over a year ago. I'd rather not tell the story, but this was a year ago, and it would be improper for me to not share given I've learned from other's Accidents/Incidents. My dive was around an island, at 20 to 45 feet deep. At about 30...

scubaboard.com

 

[happy-diver]

And again with the funny floating around in the head ideas without a reg in your hand

There is no way after oring compression when the hose and reg are by hand tightened metal to metal

can you turn an extra EIGHTH OF A TURN if you could actually turn it, without DAMAGE