RiggerLee

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Everything posted by RiggerLee

  1. If you were to build something noncommercialy for your self, I think you would be fine. Copy rites and things protect the commercial exploration of a design. Or at least that is my understanding. I don't think any thing can prevent you from building things for your self. I think it could be argued that the rigger is stealing the design and selling it commercially if he accepts money to build it for you. Having said that. I could do some thing like this. I can do it because I have twelve different types of sewing machines lined up behind me and pallet racks of fabric to the left of me. So when I get board, yah, I do fucked up shit like that. But if even I set down and counted up the hours I had in one of these projects it wouldn't make since to do it. It's only practical if I'm idol and really board. Prices are getting out of hand. I think you will start to see more of this. Like the guys building their own canopies. Mostly for fun at first but once the idea gets around, who knows. I could see some open source drawings getting out and it turning into a little kit plane kind of thing. Then they will start selling quick build kits, here are the pre cut ribs and panels... Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  2. Their is absolutely nothing wrong with an honest question. Every one here will be happy to help you. Your questions tell us a lot about your experience level. Don't be embarrassed by that. We all start some where and the most important thing is that you are asking these questions. When we give you advice, like that you should spend some time with your local rigger learning about this or any gear that you are considering it's in that spirit of trying to help you. You need to sit down with him as he inspects it, takes it apart, see how it works, and how it's built. And their are limits to what you can learn on the internet. We will help you, There are good resources here but it's no replacement to working with it with your own hands. Your best resources are always the ones right in front of you. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  3. Frankly if you know that little about it you should really get it sent to a local rigger to make sure it's the right rig for you. Their's more to this then just picking some thing out of an add column. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  4. One pin if it's an infinity. 2001 implies that. There was an older Northern light that was a two pin. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  5. What kind of system? For example the strong drogue stays fully inflated and with only 25 0r 30 lb under it would come down very slow. Sorry don't have any kind of number. Vector on the other hand partially collapses on drogue release and wouldn't drift as far. Call the company, they might have a number on decent rate. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  6. Their are some local riggers that sew as well if not better then the manufacturer, and you don't have to ship it back and forth. But I'll tell you this, I wouldn't do it for $150 and I'm about as cheep as they come. $150 is a smoking deal and I don't know why you wouldn't take advantage of it. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  7. The better it fits you the more you will like it. The two of you are going to be together for a long time. I've seen rigs out live marages. You would like for the hip junction or ring to be at the point of rotation of your leg. If it's two far forwards of that point the main lift web shift upwards and will loosen when you lift your legs, like in a sit. The rig will lift off your shoulders in a sit and that slack will allow the rig to hinge up off your back. This can range from annoying to dangerous. In the worst case you could in theory roll out the back. That has happened with a couple of badly fitting student rigs but it can happen with sport rigs if the lateral is too long or particularly if there is a lot of stagger and a small rig fits high on their back. There are people that can bend over and slide their rig off their shoulders over their head. Incut lats help with this. They do not loosen as much when the main deploys. So the measurement stays consistent. Got to go to work. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  8. On a Javelin the lateral crosses the back, loops around the webbing and goes back under the back pad. To make that loop shorter you have too pull the harness, zig zag, and where the back pad is sewn down on the side too shorten it. Easiest thing to do is peal up the bottom of the tray so you can get to every thing and just replace that whole strap. You're basically taking out all the stitching through it. Why sew through the same peace of webbing? It's by far the easiest way. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  9. They will be peeling lose the bottom of the main tray, replacing that piece of webbing, resewing two junctions... It's a great deal. You wont beat that price. It's worth the price of disassembly, shipping, etc. Insure the shipment. UPS loses shit. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  10. It's hard to make small changes by tieing a knot. You can finger trap peaces of line into the suspension line to shrink it. It's an easy way to fine tune things. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  11. It sounds like it's built into the fabric. This can happen. They go to great lengths to inspect the fabric and avoid biased rolls, and they flip panels, and other things to try and avoid this but some times the tolerances stack up and you get a canopy with a turn. Their are no good ways to fix it but there are some half assed ways. First try pulling the slider down and letting your chest strap out. It's a small thing but the more curved the canopy is, the closer the risers are together, the more twitchy they tend to be. It just exaggerates the problem. Letting it expand may make it less noticeable. Some thing else you can do, you can't fix the canopy but you can induce a turn the other way. You can do this by intentionally fucking with the symmetry of the line set by changing the trim of one side vs the other. But if you don't to get that adventurous the easiest thing you can do is to extend the full line set on one side. Sounds strange, but we all know that if your harness is asymmetric, one side slips, that it will cause a turn. If for example you add a second set of links to one side of the canopy, both front and back, you have now built a permanent asymmetry into your rig. So you have a permanent 1.25 inch harness turn built into your canopy. In this day in age, you might just have some one build you a pair of longer slinks for one side. It will look goofy. It will freak some people out. If it works you could even shorten the lines on the other side to make it less noticeable but this is the easiest way to half ass fix it. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  12. Impressive. They must really be on top of their maintenance. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  13. A low placed RSL ring through the bottom loop only helps if the bottom of the riser stays with the rig. People keep talking about risers breaking at the grommet hole but oddly the majority that I have seem break snapped at the tape of the third ring. I mean that tape broke. This means that the whole riser released. This is 3 out of the 5 I've seen break. One did break at the grommet and one broke at the front riser. Snaps, magnets, or just rubber banding the center of the slider up to one of the attachment points certainly helps to avoid the occasional brisk opening. I don't think this is a bad thing at all. I don't think it's a solution to the explosively hard openings that break things and kill people. We're not talking about some thing that leaves you sore. These are like an order of magnitude higher. I don't think they are a product of the riser creeping down. I think they are the result of a much grosser failure of the staging of the canopy. Like Dennis. I figure he got one riser caught under the corner of his tray on that sit fly deployment. This difference in length means that one side of the risers and there fore the slider was pulled down about 4 feet lower then the other. One side could almost fully open unhindered and then the riser pops lose and the canopy is fully open. It was a specter if your curious, not that it matters with some thing like this. I suspect sever out of sequence openings, bag dumps played a part in some others as well. That's why I'm comfortable talking about a weaker riser or other fail point. The magnitude of the peak forces are way beyond the change due to wear. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  14. Yes it was a thing. There were a few canopies that tried to use it. It doesn't work very well. The PC is in the burble of the canopy and provides inconsistent drag and the line burns up the canopy as it passes through. Solid sliders that block the wind into the canopy work much better. Good thought, but it turns out that it doesn't work well. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  15. I think nether. It was staging. The change to micro and ZP created staging issues. Packing practices that worked, or that we go away with, on dacron lined f-111 canopies would not work with the new materials. And although they came out together they were not necessarily used together. we saw f-111 with micro and ZP with dacron. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  16. Turning the riser into a fuse is basically what we are talking about. I'd say build lighter slinks but they are much more of a wear area. The riser leg is less of a wear and less prone to change over a reasonable life span. This problem has come in waves. Once we had good sliders and good staging the problems of hard openings was basically solved. Then as micro line and ZP showed up it reared it's head again. Now as fall rates pick up with free flying we are seeing it again. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  17. It wouldn't and it doesn't do so now. It shouldn't be too much to ask for people to replace their shit when it wears out. And yes that's a problem now as it is. I don't think the over all life span would change that much do to wear. The areas we are talking about are not the wear areas. There is much more wear around the three rings. All of the failures I've seen on third ring tapes and grommets have been on older risers. Interestingly, the risers I saw break above the junction were almost new. So in an asymmetric opening most of the load on the right front riser it failed the riser above the junction before it broke the three ring or grommet. So with a brand new riser, built properly, correct dimensions, I think the strength of the three ring is greater then that type 17. But as the three ring wears it drops below the strength of the riser and becomes the failure point. What I'm suggesting is that we build the riser such that the leg, which isn't the main wear point, would remain the weak link through out it's expected service life. Looked at from that perspective It wouldn't be that much weaker then a used riser. Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  18. That's valid. I think it's fair to say that these aberrant openings only happen when some thing goes wrong but there are a lot of things to go wrong. The quad was sit flying when he lost a main. Best if that never happened but... shit happens. Was it just the air speed? I think a riser got caught under his reserve tray and caused an out of sequence opening but that's just my theory. People are free flying all the time. Short of building 170 mph canopies I don't see a solution to that. Remember the video of the wing suter that sucked their canopy all the way back onto to their back on opening and then had basically a slider down opening on his main? I know a woman that I think that happened to. Almost destroyed her shoulder. I don't think it's a small canopy problem. Historically I've seen way more problems with small canopies then large ones. This is one of the reasons I am very skeptical about new goofy stowless bag designs. I think those things are asking for trouble. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  19. It's a real problem. I've known 3 people that died from hard openings on mains and one quadriplegic. A screamer or bungee would not work because there is not enough energy absorption. It's force over distance and the numbers are too high. I work with them in several designs, we have a screamer on our nose cone. Just built a system with a break tape followed by a large screemer for the attachment points for hover test of our air frame to protect the crane truck. And they are really bulky by the way. Snapping the riser is the way to go to limit the load. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  20. I would argue that we have this now in the form of mini risers. The problem with that is that we have RSL's. You could call the collens lanyard a fix for that problem but I see it as a fix for a fix and would argue that simplifying the system removing the RSL would be a cleaner way to go. Another thought is to reevaluate the way we are building risers. A riser where the break point would be above the RSL connection. I have seen mini risers break above the confluence point, front riser snapped, so we're not that far off. I think the problem is the internal stresses in the three ring. I've seen several tapes break on the third ring. If we went to an Aerodyne stile riser with an elongated second ring we might move the break point up above the release. Another thought is risers with a lower tinsel strength webbing. And you can have webbing woven to any speck. For example we had a tape woven for a raideal seam that was 1200 lb vs the normal 500. So if we built a lighter riser, with good reinforcing tape in the grommet, and an Icon ring we could move the failure point up above the junction. Pick the strength and set the limit to the load you want the jumper and harness to endure. And this isn't a speculative goofy discussion. People have died from opening shock. I've known several who ether died or might have died from opening shock and one that's paralised. And... remember the Racer that blew up? Broke all the stitching on the chest strap. I've seen several leg junctions blow partially or completely. Fortunately they were on rigs with redundant stitching. Or the russion rig that blew up at the upper junction. Or the base rig that blew up at the upper junction, built just like a skydiving reserve riser. Point is you can and we have broken shit. Both our harnesses and our selves. I don't consider this to be a theoretical discussion. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  21. You could argue about some of the dimensions but the snatch is the first commercial effort to build a better PC. It's head and shoulders above the two flat plates that you get with most PC. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  22. Historically the well designed spring loaded pilot chutes did have a limiter. They were much better designs with better drag. The designs got compromised to make them easier to manufacture. Look at the MA-1. That was actually a well thought out design. The spring is enclosed in a tube preventing any thing from intangibility. A simple limiter tape would tend to get tangled around the coils when it was compressed. The MA-1 is in much better proportion then modern pilot chutes. A round canopy wants to inflate into a hemisphere. The out wards force has to balance the inward force of the lines. It really needs lines at least one diameter in length. So if a PC is 36 inches across it wants to have 36 inch long lines from base to edge. Longed is actually better but 1 D is about the point of diminishing returns. If you look at the MA-1 it has a long point way below the limited length of the spring. The spring does not actually define the shape of the PC in any way. If you want a semi modern example look at some of the older strong PC's... the Little grabber? As I recall it was basically the same design only with modern mesh. Could use a better spring but that's another story. Now look at most of the abortions that we build today. Every thing from hand deploys to most of the reserve pc. A lot of them are just two disks, one of fabric, one of mesh. So you can hot cut them together and just sew around the edge. This makes the "lines" about half the length they should be. Pulling down the apex helps but they still suck. The bottom line is that we didn't actually want some thing good. We wanted some thing easy. Some thing we could build. Some thing that would fold flat and roll up or pack small. And the truth is that in most cases we didn't need that much drag so any thing would do. Some of the earlier PC's had nice long springs like the 357 or strong tandem but then there seemed to be a movement towards smaller shorter springs and letting them act as a limiter. I've seen these stretched and mangled on high speed deployments. For example we tried using Power Racer PC once on a recovery system and blew them up. We wound up basically building mini MA-1 around that spring and they worked great. So the answer to your question is that good PC's do in fact have a limiter but it's usually in the form of a tube. Modern PC's don't have one because we are lazy and cheap. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  23. I'd say it would. I'm not sure if it's retroactive to older systems. The strong system as an example predates the TSO and just operated under a waver for decades. I'm not sure where it fits in the TSO. It's probable been tested under it and operates under it at this point. Regardless the tandem systems are so integral as a system that trying to substitute generic skydiving parts or build your own just doesn't make sense. Being out of country, I'm guessing that some one is cutting corners or asking you to. I realize that shipping things internationally is a pain but he wants to operate a tandem operation I recommend that you tell him to get serious, pony up and buy the parts he needs. If you're in the far corners of the would then you need to be proactive in stocking parts. It's not worth cutting corners on this. Notice that I'm saying this and I'm some one that is fully capable of building just about any thing. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com
  24. I'm not the best person to give you advise. I was looking at this more from a rigging/technology point of view then as a job. As I understand it there are two groups that run smoke jumper operations. I think one is the Forest Service and the other might be the Bureau of Land Management? Public lands in the US can be managed by any of a number of branches of the government or they might be tribal lands belonging to the native Americans. So there are two different groups administered by different parts of the government. I was looking more at the gear and I can tell you that one group jumps steerable rounds and the other jumps squares. Let me clarify that. They jump things like a Goliath 360 sq ft 7 cell. Think MC-1. Not a bad choice for what they are doing but I've jumped rounds that had a better turning speed. Point is that if you learned to skydive to help you with this goal you sort of wasted your time. Unless you specialized in jumping accuracy with a para foil then the skills wont really translate. I think one group static lines them just like a military jump. The other does drogue fall. It's an interesting system where you hang vertically under the drogue. You are basically part of the cargo load. I'm hard pressed to think of any similarities to sport skydiving. I don't think that's even a metric that they look at in selection. They can start from scratch just as easily. My understanding is that what they really look for is really good experienced fire fighters. That's what they really are. The jumping is just delivery to the site. They look for the best, strongest fire fighters they can find. I don't know what their experience requirements are but they are measured in years. They look for people capable of operating on their own with no back up or support in what is by definition very isolated areas. What's your story? I assume you're a fire fighter in Chile? Do you work for the government there? What are your goals? Are there smoke jumpers there or are you trying to establish a program? Being from out side of the country might actually open up some opportunities for you. They might be interested in a program of cross pollination? You might approach it as an exchange program between the two countries. If your respective bosses put their heads together they might sell it as a cross training program between our two nations. Lee Lee [email protected] www.velocitysportswear.com