beezyshaw

The seal thread runs through the middle of the lead seal, then around the pin, then back through the seal and then it is pressed closed. When the pin is pulled, the thread breaks (unless the rigger leaves too long a loop around the pin). So, to answer your question, the seal and thread can only be used one time and cannot be removed from the rig without breaking the thread.

So how many is this for you, like 75 or something?

I'd have to say my 4 children are my greatest blessing. And speaking of that, my daughter informed me this morning I'm going to be a Grand Dad next summer! Damn, my youngest will be an aunt at 5 yrs. old!

Here's wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas! http://www.hiperusa.com/MyChristmasCard.pps (Note: this power point card is just a wee bit nsfw)

Pretend that the blue blocks are gross stuff people throw out of their car windows, and the black walls are the people sitting next to you in the big van on Saturday mornings :-)

The object of the game is to move the red block around without getting hit by the blue blocks or touching the black walls. If you can go longer than 18 seconds you are phenomenal. It's been said that the US Air Force uses this for fighter pilots. They are expected to go for at least 2 minutes. http://tinyurl.com/56t9u

I think you probably couldn't come up with much of a worse material than Vectran for a closing loop. I'd bet that if you made a closing loop from Vectran you'd change it about 4 or 5 times as often as you would a nylon loop. There are many good reasons for using the "gutted 550" nylon sheathing for closing loops. Among them, as mentioned, is because a loop of proper length is tight when your container is closed but will still have some elasticity to allow your pin to release correctly. Also, it's made of a material that passes easily through the grommets. Your comment about being "bothersome over time" is puzzling. I find that a closing loop on my container will last at least a couple of hundred jumps.

Hi, Scott. The Nitro was always made from the traditional Gelvenor (easy packing) zp; that was the only zp parachute cloth they offered until recently. Now the silicon-based cloth is all they make in zp fabric for parachute manufacture. The specs for their cloth are virtually identical to SoarCoat, the long time industry standard from Performance Textiles. We use the South African cloth because of its cost effectiveness.

This is only RUMOR, so take that for what it's worth. Someone suggested to me that it MIGHT have something to do with emissions or air polution from the manufacturing process, and that to comply with new standards would be cost prohibitive. Again, I DID NOT hear this from Gelvenor, so it may be complete b.s.

The fabric you're referring to is Gelvenor LCN 0286, which was made from a polymer based yarn that is no longer available. The more common "slippery" zp fabric is treated with a silicon process. The advantages of the silicon treatment are that the tear strength is much higher. The disadvantage, other than the difference in packing, is that the silicon process is much more expensive. We just got slammed with about a 15% price increase in cloth price when our only choice for fabric became the silicon zp cloth. When you ask why "Gelvenor" fabric is no longer available, you're in fact referring to a type of cloth woven by Gelvenor Textiles, but Gelvenor is the textile mill, not a specific type of fabric. My company's canopies will still be made from Gelvenor fabric.

I think I'm going to call "The Skydiving Team" or "Life Thrills" because they can actually offer me Olympic Skydiving The people in the FAI have been working on this for 20 years, and all they really needed to do to get skydiving in the games was call Skyride.

I don't see that as a likely part of the problem here. I'd think that too much canopy in the ears of the bag would actually reduce the tension on the locking stows because less canopy would be down at the opening of the freebag. What I would think the problem is related to is the free stow cord itself; it was either too short or not made of a material with enough elasticity to properly stretch some to allow the locking stows to release. Was the length of the free stow checked against the mfr's specs? And the amount of stretch to the bungee material, did it seem normal?

Know someone from Fucking Austria?

Sometimes that's true, Mark, but often it's not. When Lee broke 4 lines on his canopy a few months back, it was the center A's and B's and the breaks were about 2 feet below the canopy. They did snap in about the same place, but not as you say. Another place they break is at the loops at the connector links. As these areas wear from contact with the links, this is easily explained. When you pull test lines to failure, a finger trap shoulder or a knot placed in the line will be the failure point, but in actual use I've seen several exceptions. Also, one "slight" disadvantage to softlinks is that the fabric-to-fabric contact with the suspension lines will cause more wear than smooth stainless links will. It isn't generally enough of an issue to go back to metal, but it does wear the lines (specifically Vectran, Dacron, and HMA). Spectra lines on spectra softlinks don't seem to show signs of this.

Yes, it's been tested, but when you get any smaller than the braid of the 160 kg (ie 350 lb) line (widely in use on the Nitro for many years), you run into two problems. One, it gets darn hard to put a good stitch in anything smaller, and two, the strength and logevity become so compromised it doesn't seem to me to be practical to use. Not to say that things can't change in the future, but remember, your canopy is more than your swoop vehicle - it is first and foremost a life saving device. If you start snapping lines and riding reserves left and right, how much benefit is there to that, regardless of the amount of reduced drag?

Hey Carbone, don't go in 'till I can get down there to get in on splittin' your gear...and since I'm gonna be pretty busy for a while, just hold off, OK?

I haven't been chased by anyone really pissed off at me lately, so for me, not in a while.

These guys shouldn't hang out on the sidelines together

If I were in a plane that caught on fire, I would jump that stuff, but beyond that, I certainly wouldn't pay any money for it. I suggest you save up your money during the winter and get something a little more modern that you will be much happier with. And if I were to own that rig, I certainly wouldn't go throw more money at it like you're considering. Sometimes the idea of owning your own gear instead of renting gets in the way of good decision making.

I guess that's fairly recent, then, because for the longest time they simply didn't exist.

Good advice, Andy, but what a thread-drift. Back to Eclipse rigs...I have two Eclipse rigs, and both my tandem and sport rigs are, let's just say "very close" to the dimensions of "other" rigs that were popular at the time of their manufacture. So, an appropriately rated rigger can determine compatibility of components and make substitutions for parts based on that. In other words, the right person could use a reserve freebag/pilot chute in an Eclipse that wasn't actually made by Stunts, and the rig would be safe and legal for return to service.

No, actually the biggest reason (and I can tell you this because of my experience manufacturing for Icarus for several years) is that no finished line trim numbers were ever generated for the end-user. I believe that still the only actual documents are excel spreadsheets used for manufacturing, which would be of little use to the typical end-user or even most riggers.

While it can be argued that something is "worth" what the market will bear, I tend to agree with JP on this. And if I'm not mistaken you can end up paying way more than $600 for the whole ball of wax options suit. Just to put this in perspective, a few years ago when I worked at Precision, I had a torn out knee in my $250 jumpsuit. I took it to our production manager to OK it with her for me to have one of our sewing machine operators repair it. I said something like, "I just hate to have a $250 jumpsuit with a ragged looking hole in the knee" to her, and she picked the suit up, turned it inside out, went over it from stem to stern, and said "you mean something like this costs $250? We're in the wrong business!" So, moral of the story is, in a professional's opinion, there is a whole lot more profit in jumpsuits than in canopy manufacture. Think about it, Tony was in the canopy business for several years, ever wonder why he went back to just building suits?

I'm with you Chris. All these pages of bs, when I saw the first post I went through 5 freakin pages of posts looking for the pictures, and all I got was a bunch of shoulders to cry on and crap like that... To the op, dude you'll feel really really better about this whole thing after you post the naked pics, then you can look back and go "there, take that, bitch!"

John, John, John. A Subaru wagon? Now it's for sure... you're a lesbian trapped in a man's body