sheeks

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Posts posted by sheeks

  2. It appears the mill-spec bands despite being stretchier than i'm used to, don't seem to break as easy as the others

     

    i've ordered a fish scale and if it takes the required 8-12 pounds to undo the stows then i will jump them and see how well they hold up compared to the others

  3. On 9/19/2022 at 9:00 AM, fcajump said:

    I used tube stows for 15+ years and found them expensive but reliable.
    I used Keener bands for 15+ more years and have found them cheaper and reliable.
    If the new supplier is not producing quality, I will likely go back to tube stows.  If you're not familiar with them, get with someone who is... I've heard folks that are scared of them, but not seen any reason to be.

    DO NOT experiment with solid bands like 'o' rings or castration bands.  Every 5-10 years someone "discovers" them again... the will NOT break when you need them to do so.  

    FWIW, when I used tube stows I found that the natural and black lasted well, but the bright colored ones did not (for me)... they looked cool, but wore out quickly.

    JW

     

    Do you double-wrap your tube stows? Some say not too, but it seems the lines can roll out easily otherwise

  5. Posted

    Ever since the global working shortage it seems all the rubber bands from chutingstar arrive somewhat, with no powder, and break super easy. This has been consistant among multiple shipments

    obviously this isn't ideal

     

    i was wondering if anyone knew of any companies selling good, legit, fresh rubber banda?

  7. Posted

    I’ve noticed that when packing, when I go to set the canopy down it tends to get pretty sloppy and distorted. Sort of just drapes all over my arm during the setting process and I feel like the lines get a bit moved around and the fabric unflaked

     

    Obviously it’s not the end of the world but it would be nice to be able to neaten up that part of packing

     

    I try to keep forward tension on the fabric while doing it but doesn’t seem to be enough to keep the canopy shape in place

    Do you guys have any tips on keeping the flaked shape the same when setting it down?

  8. I’ve never been able to find a record of someone dying of a hard opening while using dacron lines, altho u can obviously still get slammed

     

    also, you would need a huge drogue to slow you down to 75mph from terminal, a size that would be extraordinarily obstructive to fit on a sport rig

     

     

  9. · Edited by sheeks

    sfzombie i really respect and appreciative the innovation behind this idea, but it just overall doesn’t come across as very practical. i can think of many jumps i’ve done where an extra few seconds of having to tinker around with a drogue system would’ve likely caused trouble in some way or another. a lot of times when it’s time to pull, it’s simply time to pull. there’s a reason why you need 500 jumps to fly near a tandem pair in the sky 

    there’s things like slider snaps, proper packing and slowing your body down during opening that are just much more practical to deal with.

     

    you’d be suprised with how slow you could make your body by dearching and widening up alone, it’s what i do for deployment time

     

    you also don’t want to be too too slow at pull time either or you could get all sorts of twisted up

     

    i know plenty of people with hundreds of jumps including myself who’ve never had a proper hard opening.

    if you don’t have dacron lines on that raven, that’s more of a life-saver than a drogue would be

     

    maybe spend some time in the tunnel working on your arching j dearching just seeing how high and floaty you can get. when i deploy i pretend i’m in the tunnel trying to go upwards, and i swear sometime it’s like i almost don’t even feel the first few seconds of opening

  10. · Edited by sheeks

    sfzombie13, you’re like me. i’ve thought about stuff like this before too when i first started jumping, but it’s really just not practical. when i started jumping, like you, i read stuff online about hard openings and it scared me, but spending your skydiving career in fear of a hard opening isn’t a practical way to embrace the sport

    The idea you’re proposing would not only add a lot of extra trouble, but it would hinder you from being able to easily skydive with your friends and celebrate the sky properly

    i’ve only been jumping for a few years, but let me fill you in on a little secret: Most people don’t know shit about their equipment, most people don’t listen to the manufacturers recommendations on packing, and most people are in on the long-running joke of packing their parachutes as half-assedly as possible and saying “i hope this one opens good!”, and 99.9% of the time it manages to work out for them

    if you don’t want to die of a hard opening, just pack nicely, fly a parachute that opens softly, de-arch before opening to slow down, keep your eyes on the horizon during deployment, and use dacron lines. hell, maybe even get a slightly domed slider to help ensure it catches air properly. double stow your locking stows, replace them if worn, and make sure they have a solid 2.5 to 3 inches of line bite size. flat track away from formations, and stop forward speed before opening.

     

    a lot of people stack all the odds against themselves. they fly steeply away from a track, single-stow their locking stows with a one inch bite, trash pack parachutes that are known to open quickly, use no-stretch lines, and somehow miraclously manage to only have a slammer once every season or two

    i’ve found using a “pack monkey” bought online helps with slider control during the S-folds

    a spectre with dacron lines does me wonders, a pilot with dacron lines works wonders for others. not sure why you’re using a raven as a main, but who knows if it opens well for you then so be it

     

    there are tons of videos and articles online you can read and watch about hard openings, some of jon leblancs stuff is informative. they’re not just a mystery occurance, it’s pretty well known these days the reasons behind them

     

  11. · Edited by sheeks

    On 7/4/2020 at 8:26 PM, 20kN said:

    Well I dont know what your definition is of reliable. I think you're using the word reliable to mean soft. To me reliable = always on heading and never with a malfunction. In that case, the best you're going to get is a BASE canopy followed by jumping a lightly loaded reserve as a main followed by jumping a 0-3 CFM 7-cell wingsuiting canopy. No 9-cell can come even close in reliability to any of those options.

    I just meant consistantly/reliably soft.

  13. · Edited by sheeks

    On 5/31/2020 at 11:58 AM, jj0415 said:

    I'm happy to see this thread, even if from 2005. I'm 39, 110 lbs, and I have been jumping for 6 years with over 400 jumps. I pack the same way every time, but I had an extremely hard opening on my Safire2 139 last Saturday. It literally felt like my back snapped in half, and my chest ripped apart all at the same time. I finally went to the ER due to extreme pain in my back (and neck and shoulder-right side only), and swelling in my chest and neck. The CT scan showed a compression fracture on T6. They also told me that I tore my right pectoral muscle and strained muscles in my neck and right shoulder. They fitted me into a full back brace and sent me home with muscle relaxers and pain meds. I'm clueless as to how this happened and find myself questioning everything. How can a hard opening do so much damage? I've been trying to get in with a spine specialist, but in the meantime I have no direction as to what I'm supposed to be doing or not doing, how long I have to wear this brace, and when I'll be able to jump again. Not to mention it really messes with your head. Is this a common thing? I've been injured on landing plenty times, even tore my ACL and had to have surgery that left me out of the sport for almost a year. But this is not something I ever anticipated would happen. 

    If your locking stows are loose and the canopy comes out of the bag early, the slider won't be able to do it's job properly. Use fresh rubber bands and double stow the locking stows.

    Also, the safire2 doesn't allow dacron lines. Use dacron lines, and maybe even a slightly domed slider if you wanted to be extra certain. Like the same length and width as the regular slider for the canopy size, but in my personal experience just 2 inches of dome doesn't really increase the opening time much but does increase the reliability of openings.  Make sure when quartering the slider that the fabric is as deep in the canopy as possible. I got my dome slider at paraconcepts.com

     

    A spectre or pilot with dacron lines, with tight locking stows, are about some of the most reliable openings you can get. The hybrid pilot would soften the openings even farther.

  15. · Edited by sheeks

    9 hours ago, wolfriverjoe said:

     Ummm….

     

    He died in 2017.

     I thought I edited my post after I looked it up

    Now that you mention it, I actually remember now when he died, I was at Wormtown festival an word of his death spread rapidly. I had just seen him live a few months prior at Peach festival

  18. · Edited by sheeks

    I think there’s three practical things people can do to help prevent hard openings

     

    1. Tight locking stows, with high quality rubber bands or stows. If you’re using regular rubber bands, DOUBLE STOW THEM. If your locking stows release early, the opening can be very hard. I use fresh rubber bands for my middle two stows every jump, maybe excessive though.

     

    2. Dacron lines, as everyone knows for several reasons.

     

    3. A slightly domed slider. It will be a lot harder for the slider to come down the lines unevenly allowing wind to go past it, if it’s domed. I used a standard 23 x 31 size slider on my canopy, except with 2 inches of dome to it. The openings take the same amount of time as a regular 23 x 31 slider, but the way the slider inflates in the middle gives me peace of mind in knowing that it’s far less likely to slide down prematurely compared to one that’s just purely flat when it’s fully stretched out. Think about it, what catches air better, a bowl or a flat plate?

  19. Posted

    Someone at my dropzone has an old hornet and it’s the easiest thing to pack in the world, and suprisingly enough after much research it’s actually made out of ZP and was known for how easy to pack it was, even knew.

     

    Were there any specific disadvantages to this type of ZP coating compared to the more popular kind today?

  21. Posted

    I only have a handful of jumps on my new PC but in my few jumps I’ve had the following happen:

     

    1. After landing, it was so far collapsed that the hackey had gone through the bottom square hole in the mesh

    2. On another jump, the bridle was really twisted up

     

    It deployed just fine, but I could’ve sworn reading somewhere once that these could be problems indicative of a kill line that’s setup too short or something? I notice there’s some slack in the kill like in my D-bag even after cocking it, but I’m able to get blue in the window, and it catches air on the ground reasonably fine. So maybe i’m just overthinking things, considering I can get blue in the window?

     

    What’s your 2 cents

  22. · Edited by sheeks

    10 hours ago, tripp9r said:

    Teuge usually does ~12.000ft but theyre down until 1st of June due to the corona pandemic.

    Oh dope, thanks man. Yeah I know they’d all be down now, I was just thinking more long term because I was thinking of possibly moving to the Netherlands a few years down the line. 

     

    I think I was just confused because some placers do tandems lower, but looks like fun jumpers get the 13k standard everywhere. Dopesauce

  24. Posted

    https://youtu.be/axCeYlY_6io

     

    Hey guys, I know people generally may not put a lot of thought into their PC packing method, but this Brian Germain technique seems like it can really help in the case of a horseshoe malfunction.

     

    One thing I will add though, is if you have a freefly tuck tab on your PC that you use, then this method (along with some other methods) can cause some material to scrunch up under your bridal cover during deployment which can wear on your PC, but that problem can be fixed by leaving enough slack to do your last bridal fold on the outside of the PC after rolling it up, so that way there’s zero PC material underneath the bridle to abrade against the bridle cover/container flap (whatever your container tucktab goes into), making for a smoother deployment.

  25. 7 hours ago, RiggerLee said:

    Strong c1200 cargo canopy. 1200 sqft 15 cells. A,b,c,d,e,f,g lines. grommet spacing can't really be wider then the cell so you wind up with an inner and outer set of grommets to allow three cells to inflate with the slider up. It gives you the area you need to deccelerate the payload before the rest of the canopy opens. You wind up with four grommets front to back in four rows and six on the back edge for break lines. They extend the back edge of the slider and have there own slider stops to increase its area. You actually have eight primary risers that give you inner and outer on each side. They Y near the top  front to back to allow the slider to come all the way down, accommodate those four grommets in each row. 16x7 noncascaded 1000 lb lines and 6 primary break lines 2000 lb split to 12 attachment points. 

     

    So ya, it's a beast, 68 lbs of joy, but I've seen it survive 20,000 lb opening shock.

     

    Lee

    Were the openings on that thing super soft?