Rotating 1st stage turret as reliable as fixed?

[JDubs09]

Thinking about replacing my Apeks ds4+ with the dst for ease of hose routing. Do a significant amount of cold water diving so worried the more rotating parts, the more points of failure. Is this something I should be concerned about?

 

[Fibonacci]

My understanding about reliability issues (not necessarily Apeks) is that over-tightening the brass inner collar nut on the swivel cap was the primary concern, where the threads could stress crack through and the cap detach leading to catastrophic failure (!)
IIR there was a SP recall where a brass collar nut nut was replaced with stainless, when correctly torqued the chances of failure are very low indeed.
I’ve dived several bands of regulator with swivel caps for many years (esp Sea Hornet and Atomic), and prefer them as there’s less strain on hoses and easier routing.
With just the usual servicing of the primary swivel cap o-ring and Teflon thrust washer I’ve found them very trouble free.

 

[Centrals]

How about those Apeks first stages in which the 5th port can be added eg. FSR?

 

[tbone1004]

@JDubs09
it is an extra o-ring, and it is a dynamic o-ring, it is obviously inherently "less reliable" than something without that variable. Is that reduction in reliability an issue? Not in my opinion or in that of pretty much every other technical instructor out there as almost universally the biggest dives are done with 5-port swivel turrets *read multi-mile cave pushes, 100m+ dive depths, etc etc*. None of that is "tried" even harder by ice diving, so I wouldn't worry about it. Apeks DST has passed NORSOK testing with swivel turrets and that is about as abusive of a test as it gets with high work load, really deep, high gas density, and REALLY cold. Poseidon is the only other company that has passed that test.

 

[kelemvor]

Is this something I should be concerned about?

No. It's my understanding that the only practical drawback to a swivel turret is cost. If you're worried about that minimal price difference then tech diving might not be for you anyway.

 

[rjack321]

Sometimes the swivel turrent orings do fail, but it never seems to be catastrophic blow up kind of failures, more of a slow dribble. HP seats are the biggest cause of massive gas loss and they are the same swivel or not.

 

[NorCalDM]

I have about 300 dives on my DST in cold and warm water with no issues. My wife and son both use it as well with not a problem and believe me my son is not easy on his gear. I do like ease of hose routing.

 

[rhwestfall]

a risk, but pretty far down the chain in "need to eliminate this potential issue" as it is pretty low in probability of occurrence.....

 

[OTF]

Any differences in reliability or trust (even in extreme edge cases) between the genuine time-tested DST vs. the DST clones like hog/scubaforce/deep6 etc. ?

(Tbone I believe you answered a similar question before in another thread, but i'm trying to wrap my head around the differences between these apparently very similar regs.)

 

[tbone1004]

Any differences in reliability or trust (even in extreme edge cases) between the genuine time-tested DST vs. the DST clones like hog/scubaforce/deep6 etc. ?

(Tbone I believe you answered a similar question before in another thread, but i'm trying to wrap my head around the differences between these apparently very similar regs.)

not in reliability or trust. They are all machined very well, the clones tend to have better plating quality and come with the bottom port as standard, and all are prone to HP seat manufacturing issues that have plagued all of the manufacturers at one time or another.
The biggest difference for me are which brands support their customers. Apeks do not, they support their dealers who are expected to support you.

My money goes to Deep6, and actually just did as last week I ordered 5 more sets of them