Karl_H
Contributor
Have you considered a combination of both? I’d say the Razor harness is much better hands down than the Stealth, however the Stealth bladder is much better than the Razor BAT wing.
The highlight of the Stealth harness is the weighting system, otherwise the harness isn’t so great – there’s a lot of potential failure points from so many joins and connections while the movable rubber d-rings aren’t particularly useful in all honesty and are best replaced with regular d-rings. The Razor harness is very efficient and has minimal failure points, at the end of the day the only harnesses that come close to the Razor are those that have blatantly copied it!
The bladder on the standard Razor 2 harness has some problems with air gathering in the centre, if they can add some baffles to the next generation razor harness this would be a massive improvement, however for regular giving the BC on the Stealth is very streamline and doesn’t stick out much if mounted on the outer bungee attachment points. The Razor wing does have a big advantage of coming with a back-up bladder in the wing, however if you really need a lot of lift on a back-up wing the oral inflation isn’t the easiest thing to inflate – especially with the standard mouthpiece. I changed the mouthpiece on my Razor 2 for the mouthpiece that came with the MSR bag used with a Razor 1 – this mouth piece has a ‘open/close’ switch which make inflation much easier (although far from ‘easy’. The stealth BC does need a bit more playing around to attach, it has three bungee connections as opposed to the 1 required for the Razor BAT wing.
If you are planning on diving dry and need a lot of weight the stealth weighting system is hard to beat, although it’s not difficult to make a similar modification to a razor harness using a parts from a soft weightbelt. I’d say both harnesses were far superior to the SMS50 so you should be very happy with either.
Karl
The highlight of the Stealth harness is the weighting system, otherwise the harness isn’t so great – there’s a lot of potential failure points from so many joins and connections while the movable rubber d-rings aren’t particularly useful in all honesty and are best replaced with regular d-rings. The Razor harness is very efficient and has minimal failure points, at the end of the day the only harnesses that come close to the Razor are those that have blatantly copied it!
The bladder on the standard Razor 2 harness has some problems with air gathering in the centre, if they can add some baffles to the next generation razor harness this would be a massive improvement, however for regular giving the BC on the Stealth is very streamline and doesn’t stick out much if mounted on the outer bungee attachment points. The Razor wing does have a big advantage of coming with a back-up bladder in the wing, however if you really need a lot of lift on a back-up wing the oral inflation isn’t the easiest thing to inflate – especially with the standard mouthpiece. I changed the mouthpiece on my Razor 2 for the mouthpiece that came with the MSR bag used with a Razor 1 – this mouth piece has a ‘open/close’ switch which make inflation much easier (although far from ‘easy’. The stealth BC does need a bit more playing around to attach, it has three bungee connections as opposed to the 1 required for the Razor BAT wing.
If you are planning on diving dry and need a lot of weight the stealth weighting system is hard to beat, although it’s not difficult to make a similar modification to a razor harness using a parts from a soft weightbelt. I’d say both harnesses were far superior to the SMS50 so you should be very happy with either.
Karl