Suggestion Technician to technician forum

[KOMPRESSOR]

Scubaboard has it's restricted instructor to instructor forum, which I'm sure I will use when I'm done with my OWI this winter!

Although right away I miss a "Technician to technician forum" for us that either makes some pocket change or those who are building up huge empire DS-stores on fixing other peoples' problems with diving gear like regs or compressors.

I'm doing service and installations of diving compressors myself and might contribute some there. I'm also a newbie tech on valve service (Apeks, Aqualung and Coltri Sub), and I could really need someone to ask now and then, to check if I got the manuals right.

Howboutit anyone out there? :blinking:

 

[miketsp]

I don't really understand where you draw the line for a forum like this.
Regs are designed to be reliable which means that they depend upon basic mechanical functions. They're certainly not rocket science.
I have various regs in the family, I have all the servicing manuals, sometimes I do them myself, sometimes I put them in to a local shop, it really comes down to my free time availability.
I did an equipment course a couple of years ago because it came for free with a purchase I made and the group was not very mixed. There were two guys getting into it because they wanted to set up a servicing business and already had quite a lot of experience with industrial compressed air systems, the rest were instructor wannabees just looking to collect another card and not really interested in the subject matter, and myself.
Even so, after only about 10 hours training even those least interested and non-mechanically minded were able to strip down, clean and examine for faults a variety of regs and valves and then rebuild them and adjust them in such a way that they had a high probability of working just as well as some of the regs that I've seen coming out of many "professional" repair shops. Sometimes they might have been a little hard to breath or have a tendency to free-flow but I didn't see anyone during the entire course produce a product that would likely cause a catastrophic life-threatening failure.
Since the instructor had a lot of repair experience I gained some tips, but nothing that put in doubt my own self-trained ability gained from just reading and stripping down and rebuilding my own regs.
Being self-taught, if I had any doubt about whether or not a part was still usable I would play safe and discard it and replace it with new. During the course I learned some practical criteria for evaluating remaining service life of some parts.
If you read around the general forums and get through the noise there is a already a lot of information to be gleaned. Examples: search for O2 cleaning or upgrading older regs with newer service kits to take advantage of performance improvements, solutions for noisy 1st stages, where to get hold of special tools, what sites have downloads for manuals. The list goes on.
The other issue here is that a lot of divers that have no real interest in servicing their regs but are curious about how they work and how they are serviced. Or just enjoy talking about such subjects. How else to explain the disproportion of Internet divers whose posts outweigh their dives by several orders of magnitude or they're not even certified?

Quite frankly I consider the isolation of this type of information into a restricted forum would be detrimental to the general interest of SB.

 

[Kim]

I think I'm with Mike on this one. I service my own regs as it's a lot easier and cheaper than getting someone in Japan to do it. I wouldn't 'qualify' as a professional, although I have enough 'professional' mechanical training to know very well what I'm doing. As Mike said - we already have a LOAD of how to type info on the board if you look hard enough - including off board links to re-build kit sources, manuals...whatever you need. MAYBE a more dedicated forum might work, but I also think that locking the information away into a restricted forum would be a bad idea.

 

[The Chairman]

We are currently moving servers and so do not want to make any changes right now. However, let's try Kompressor's ideology first.

Dive-aholic,

Normally, this sort of forum would be open for professional technicians only. However, I am willing to listen to everyone's take on that before we make any decisions.

 

[ReefGuy]

How would I fit in with Kompressor's model. I don't work for a dive shop, but I am the tech responsible for servicing our PSD team's regulators. I'm Sherwood/Genesis certified.

 

[DennisW]

Pete,

What constitutes "professional"? I have done visual inspections on some peoples tanks and for some, I charge, for others, I don't. Since I have been paid, I assume I am a professional. Do I work for a shop? No. I have completed the Diving Technologies International Scuba Gear Repair course and I have completed their Cylinder Safety Inspection certification course. I have only overhauled my own regs. Because most people want the warrantee's to continue to be valid, I would doubt they would want me to overhaul or repair a regulator that is still in warrantee. And, it is hard to get parts for most regulators. I can get parts for my own from Diving Technologies.

 

[oxyhacker]

I really dislike the notion of special restricted forums since it creates a hierarchy and inner circle which I think goes against the spirit of the net and especially of forums like this. It might make some sense, I guess, for instructors since they arrive at their qualifications after a rigorous and lengthy process, and might have issues to discuss that really don't concern the rest of us, but being "qualified" to service regs is anything but that. The only reason the notion even exists that individuals shouldn't service their own gear is because the gear manufacturers have, for reasons having to do more with profit than safety, managed to promote the notion, and by creating a special tech-only group this board would be pretty much just playing mindlessly into their hands, and helping these companies perpetuate the self-serving, illogical, and probably illegal policy of reg manufacturers.

It's pretty ironic that we freely discuss deep diving, decompression, gas mixing and homemade gear on this board but that people bring up libability the minute you talk about servicing regs! If there is a difference, I sure can't see it. You could argue equally well that the tech forums should only be open to people who can produce evidence of being certified tech divers, and gas mixing only discussed by people by certified gas mixers. Everything about diving is inherently dangerous, and hence has the possibility of creating liability.

 

[KOMPRESSOR]

I really dislike the notion of special restricted forums since it creates a hierarchy and inner circle which I think goes against the spirit of the net and especially of forums like this. It might make some sense, I guess, for instructors since they arrive at their qualifications after a rigorous and lengthy process, and might have issues to discuss that really don't concern the rest of us, but being "qualified" to service regs is anything but that. The only reason the notion even exists that individuals shouldn't service their own gear is because the gear manufacturers have, for reasons having to do more with profit than safety, managed to promote the notion, and by creating a special tech-only group this board would be pretty much just playing mindlessly into their hands, and helping these companies perpetuate the self-serving, illogical, and probably illegal policy of reg manufacturers.

It's pretty ironic that we freely discuss deep diving, decompression, gas mixing and homemade gear on this board but that people bring up libability the minute you talk about servicing regs! If there is a difference, I sure can't see it. You could argue equally well that the tech forums should only be open to people who can produce evidence of being certified tech divers, and gas mixing only discussed by people by certified gas mixers. Everything about diving is inherently dangerous, and hence has the possibility of creating liability.

I'm not locked in any way to how such a forum should be set up. As a "pro" I certainly don't think I know things better than many of you folks out there. -But maybe a little better than those who come to me with their regs & compressors. And I certainly have questions I would really like to have answered, but which I am reluctant to put out in an "open" fora, since they may create more stir than answers about how and why I, as a "pro", really don't know as much!
Now I believe the closed instructor's forum works pretty much in a manner as where newbie OWI's can ask "stupid" questions to other more experienced instructors about teaching diving, without anyone else seeing it. Get it? Perhaps they wouldn't want to ask where their former/future students could read them as well? Just a thought, and in a way my humble motivation for putting out this idea.

 

[The Chairman]

Vance,

I truly appreciate your iput here, as well as the others. We obviously have a DIY area and they deal with reg repair quite often. However, there are other issues which some may not wish the entire dive community to see: just technicians.

But since there is no clear cut standard for what constitutes a tech, like there is for an instructor, we have to think outside of the box. Maybe making this an opt in forum and evaluating WHY a person wants to join would be enough. Would that keep the casual observer OUT of this forum and enable both the tech and the manufacturers able to to discuss matters of importance?

 

[KOMPRESSOR]

Vance,

I truly appreciate your iput here, as well as the others. We obviously have a DIY area and they deal with reg repair quite often. However, there are other issues which some may not wish the entire dive community to see: just technicians.

But since there is no clear cut standard for what constitutes a tech, like there is for an instructor, we have to think outside of the box. Maybe making this an opt in forum and evaluating WHY a person wants to join would be enough. Would that keep the casual observer OUT of this forum and enable both the tech and the manufacturers able to to discuss matters of importance?

If you could get manufacturers to join such a forum I'd be hillariously happy! And you've understood my point right on when it comes to having it "closed", as you can see.

 

[miketsp]

In the instructor forum I can quite easily see why it should be closed. Incident or training discussions may well involve other SBers and knowing that the students in question are reading the posts would restrict the discussion.
OTOH I see a technician forum as serving to educate all of us.
If various technicians are having a parts availability problem or an adjustment problem on certain brands/models of reg then I for one would like to know about it.
Maybe the model should be - "Available to be read by all but posting only by opt-in"?
I think this would certainly cut down the noise level.