Screwing weights to a weight belt

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Ianw58

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Location
San Leandro
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200 - 499
Has anyone ever heard of screwing the weights to a weight belt?

The so we rented weights from on our trip screwed the weights to the belt. The weights were threaded on the webbing and then screwed through the belt and into the lead. Weights could not be removed or added because of the.

I don’t recall ever seeing this before anywhere over the past 30 years I’ve been diving.
 
Little screw from the front in the middle, common with uncommon people. When you are dialed in with your owned weights, it stops the weights migrating from the belt to the foot. It also allows for specific or equidistant weight placement for comfort and balance.
 
There used to be screwed round wheights on old (1950-60's) belts, made by La Spirotechnique/U.S. Divers.
They can be seen on many photos and movies from Cousteau
 
They probably did it to minimize the lost weights and simplify the rented belts. A belt comes back, done, don't have to count the weight and figure if you lost one of the weights or not.
 
Submarine Products, a diving equipment manufacturer headed by former Royal Navy officer Hugh Oswell and operating between 1959 and 1989 in Hexham, a town up the Tyne Valley in the North East of England, where I happen to live, is probably best known for its "Sealion" regulator that undercut the expensive Cousteau-Gagnan underwater breathing apparatus patent licence during the 1950s.

Less familiar will be the weight belt with screw-on weights designed by Submarine Products and awarded French Patent FR1314235 in 1962 entitled "Ceinture de lestage pour plongeur" (English: Diver's weight-belt). Patent drawings below:
upload_2021-8-2_19-47-46.png
The underlying rationale was to enable divers to adjust their buoyancy by screwing weights on or off, without removing the belt. Here is the weight belt on sale in a Submarine Products advertisement from a 1961 issue of the British Sub Aqua Club journal Triton.
upload_2021-8-2_19-54-44.png
For the UK market, Submarine Products also imported Beuchat diving gear (including Jetfins) from France and Skooba-"totes" drysuits from So-Lo Marx in the USA during the 1960s.
 
Really doubt any current dive rental operation is using that vintage gear.
 
Really doubt any current dive rental operation is using that vintage gear.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery in the modern world of diving equipment design as much as it is in every other sphere of human endeavour. It makes more sense knowing who first came up with the original idea of screw-in weights, patenting it as long ago as the early 1960s, and why they did so back then.:)
 
https://www.shearwater.com/products/perdix-ai/

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