Regulator sourcing discussion

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I thought Jules Verne invented all that underwater breathing stuff. He described it in 1870 when he wrote "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Sea". I know this to be factual because I saw the movie about it staring Kirk Douglas and James Mason.


And I just read it on the Internet so it must be true.
 
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I think if I can do this job with no left over parts or squeaks and rattles I can disassemble and reassemble a scuba reg.[/QUOTE]



Yeah, left over parts sucks.
 
Unfortunately people have to do more homework than just looking up the country of manufacture. Just looking ay the car manufacturers. In our extended family 2 chevies of different models had major failures at 5000! and 30k killometers. Both are made in N.A. My friend had 2 wheel berings go at 60k kms on his Ford. We now have a recall on a GE dishwasher that can catch fire due to faulty heating element.

I would smile at anyone saying N. A. Produced goods are better that the rest of the world.
 
On the topic of NA made products and their reliability.......my last Dodge Intrepid too close to $14000 in repairs to get it to die at ~240k kilometers. I replaced it with a 300 and so far it has taken $4,000 in repairs to get it to 116k kilometers and I have it scheduled to go in to have more repairs.....so I am not hopeful for a less expensive vehicle this time. Who told me NA was made better? At this point, thanks to absolute crap built in NA, I am just throwing good money after bad money. I am happy to say my Taiwanese built regulators from HOG have gotten me safely back to the surface every time so far. BTW, I have officially purchased my last Chrysler product. My next car may just be......oohhhhh.......an import. I would rather not have to spend my son's university education on my transportation so I can get to work to pay for more car repairs.
 
SLaswell hit the nail on the head with people's objection to the brand. Nobody's saying they are crap regs. We are saying please don't insult our intelligence by claiming the component materials are equal or better than apeks, Poseidon etc. I think I clarified that at least 4 times in this thread.

Unfortunately people have to do more homework than just looking up the country of manufacture. Just looking ay the car manufacturers. In our extended family 2 chevies of different models had major failures at 5000! and 30k killometers. Both are made in N.A. My friend had 2 wheel berings go at 60k kms on his Ford. We now have a recall on a GE dishwasher that can catch fire due to faulty heating element.

I would smile at anyone saying N. A. Produced goods are better that the rest of the world.

There are only a handful of companies that actually make scuba regulators - Air Liquide, Sherwood Selpac, Beuchat and Tabata are four of the largest. None of them are in the US or have US based manufacturing facilities.

Regulators from most major "brands" are designed by the company (such as Scubapro) that then outsources the production under contract to company like Tabata that has the specialized production equipment to make the design. Given the comparatively low volume involved it's a lot more cost effective to outsource production that to develop and maintain the production facilities in house. The quality that can be achieved is much better than the company could do on it's own in house equipment and the production cost is lower as the cost and upkeep of that specialized equipment is spread over a much larger number of regs made for several companies.

Other companies may also license the design and sell it under their own banner. For example, Halcyon currently markets four Scubapro first and second stages with minor cosmetic alternations, but made to the same specifications and QA tolerances. TUSA (Tabata USA) has also rebranded several Scubapro regulators, no doubt part of the manufacturing agreement with Tabata.

Still other companies license designs with or without minor changes, but with varying QA tolerances and specifications. This is where it gets sticky. There is no such thing as a free lunch and while you will find the same OEM design sold by two or more manufacturers and find them priced at widely different prices, generally speaking, the lower the price point, the wider the tolerance ranges for the parts and the more the performance will vary. I've always been impressed with the Dive Rite regs i've worked on and the quality has been uniformly high. I can;t say the same thing about most of the very similar looking regs from other manufacturers. Those regs sell for less, but that's because they are not made to the same tight tolerances.

The same thing happens within brands as well. For example the Scubapro R series second stages have never had particularly high QA standards 295 and performance varies a lot. If you've got a bit of a dog, you'll usually find you can't improve it without swapping out parts to get tolerances that stack on the right direction. In contrast the QA standards on a G250V are very high, particularly in regards to tolerances for the spring - and it has to be as that reg lacks a micro adjust feature. Try making the same design with low QA standards and you're going to have some issues.

When you apply all the above concepts to inexpensive clone regs you'll find that, given adequate acceptance standards (which is not always the case), they will meet the minimum specifications that are required by the manufacturer. However higher specifications cost more money and better performance and tighter tolerances on parts all mean a higher cost to the company selling the reg, and a higher price to the consumer. What it means is that I can swap out parts on a high end Scubapro or Aqualung reg and have a high degree of assurance of being able to tune it for peak performance that will be at a level well above a similar design that sells for a lot less money after the same parts swap as the QA standards on the lower priced reg are commensurately lower. Out of the box, that may not mean much, after you add a few years and a few hundred hours of use, and replace a few parts, it starts to become clear which reg you'd rather own and dive.

You do, to a very large extent, get what you pay for.
 
And no servising your own equipment is not inexpensive, I think with the class fee, all the tools, fuel to drive to NJ and back plus the 18 hour day, I have a total of around $800 invested in getting certified to service my own HOG regs.


so i see that servicing your own equipment is a big thing for the hogs.

I have heard that SOOOOOOOO many times; that this is one of the key factors for buying the hog.

I wonder how many people actually service their own?

- sorry but $800 investment doesn't seem to cheap to me or even an option for the average rec diver.

how many services does that equal if you had a shop do it?

for me- $100-120 bucks every two years for services - equals to 14-16 years of diving to get return in that investment!



 
DA,

This may be a little OT, but could you comment on the migration of Scubapro reg production over the years? From what I understand SP started with US produced regs (Compton?), but then moved production to Italy, and finally outsourced to Tabata. Do you know the approximate dates that this happened, and if it was all models or a more slow movement of switching a model at a time from one facility to the other? Any difference in quality between the various manufacturing locations?
 
so i see that servicing your own equipment is a big thing for the hogs.

I recall reading somewhere that between him and his wife that he has somewhere around 14 sets of regs. ( Remember, this is a tech diving brand. ) I'm sure he made that $800 back pretty quickly. That and the peace of mind that it's done right.
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/teric/

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