ctrph8

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Everything posted by ctrph8

  1. Mark Lancaster (MEL here on DZ.com) can probably whip up a set. http://www.skyworksrigging.com
  2. Meh. I'm learning to take the gold nuggets where I find them but not trust everything one person says. I personally feel like they are missing the mark when it comes to double stowing things. That being said, they have a parachute manufacturing company that will make a will make millions this year. I on the other hand do some rigging that might make dozens of dollars this year. I've jumped semi-stowless bags and will be ordering one soon. Now to figure out which one!
  3. That was my first thought too. They are REALLY nice canopies. I have two, a 129 and a 149. With my weight (250ish OTD) they are different animals. Play with different wing loadings. You'll fall in love with one of them.
  4. Check the brake line length. My first thought was that they made the brake line ending with the loop to stow the toggles but forgot to add the lower couple of feet once they made the loop. If your line is short, making the lowers is pretty easy. True, you paid for a full line set and you should get a full line set but is it worth the postage? I'd call the rigger and ask about it.
  5. I suspect that they ARE slider stops. At the end of the lines in places where sloppy packing could pull part of the fabric into the slider grommets, they install a poker chip sized piece of plastic. The idea is that this is sewn into the fabric (usually reenforced with tape) so that if you pull the slider all the way to the material when you are packing it, no material can be pulled into the slider accidentally. They sometimes have had them in other places besides the stabilizers but generally that's where the problems were. If you find one, I'd bet it is at the top of a line.
  6. I can see how teflon cables (or just keeping his non teflon cutaway oiled and in good shape) would have helped. Whether it would have prevented it can be debated but it definitely would have been a step in the right direction. In this case, would hard housings have done the trick? My gut says yes but I'd be interested in other opinions.
  7. I like the thinking on this but I'm having trouble extrapolating it to the real world. Wouldn't it be a different number for each canopy depending on the weight of the canopy/bag and maybe a whole bunch of other factors? I would think that the extraction force of a tandem would be significantly different than for an Optimum 99 and that number would differ a little from container manufacturer to manufacturer and maybe even from geographic location to geographic location. Are you looking for a standardized number (It should take XX pounds of force to extract...) or a ratio or something else?
  8. I'm a rigger and had been a packer in my early days. I've packed a lot of parachutes. When I got my new Crossfire 2 a few years ago I was astonished at how bad I was at packing this thing. It was ugly. After a while I decided to get back to basics. I watched the PD videos and the thing that helped me more than anything else was the way he folded the material under to get the cocoon shape. It took me a couple of tries but it worked. Somehow, keeping that material organized made the difference. I also paid a lot of attention to the way he kept things under control with his knees.
  9. Wow! I really like that. I was thinking about something along these lines. Nice design!
  10. Mine was poorly behaved. It would open softly just often enough that I'd stop being afraid of it... for a little while.
  11. I had that configuration. You CAN do it but it was tight. The thing felt like a brick on my back and never really looked right. I changed to an Optimum 160. That works so much better. My suggestion is to either get the Optimum or go with a larger sized reserve container. To be fair, my PDR was an older one. I think it was in the first year or so that they started using microline instead of Dacron. I don't know this but I suspect that this one packed a little bit bigger than the current PDRs.
  12. I had a similar situation but not exactly the same so YMMV. I had spinal surgery on my lower back last year and I was really nervous about jumping. I jump a Crossfire 2 but the openings are supposed to be similar. What I did when I started back was to make sure I was really square and in control when I pitched so that the load was distributed as evenly as I could get it across my body. Later I got to where I didn't even think about it. I had some off heading openings but nothing violent. I was paying a lot of attention to the amount of force that was on my pelvis/lower back. I did OK. What makes me nervous is having to really run out a landing. I downwinded one last week that I ended up sliding in because I didn't want to try to sprint.
  13. I had to really polish up on my foul language skills before I could make it look good. My best technique was to invest in an Optimum!
  14. Welcome back! Spend some time with your rigger and with a coach. Let them know where you are and take it easy getting back in to the sport. Have your rigger go through your gear and check things out when your reserve gets repacked. It should all be inspected during the repack but talk with him anyway to make sure. If you had an AAD, your batteries probably need to be changed at the very least. If it is a Cypres it will need more than that. Cypres need to be sent in every 4 and 8 years for maintenance. If it is older than 12, it will have to be removed. You can jump without one until yours comes back. The wisdom of that decision can be debated in another thread. The coach needs to see that you are being safe, in control and aware. Look through the SIM and go through a thorough briefing. Plan out every aspect of your skydive from gear check to landing and stick as close as you can to that plan. Your basic skills are probably all still there but polish up on the safety aspects, especially flying a safe pattern in to the landing area.
  15. I can't comment about Mirage, but years ago I saw some seriously cushy leg pads that the CRW folks were using. They looked like they were done at the factory but I didn't ask. Does anyone remember these... or are they still in use/production?
  16. OK, I'll take a stab at it. Probably the best advice would be to do a search for the volumes of material on here that have been written on the effects of increasing wing loading. There are even more posts about WHETHER folks should downsize. That is a different question so if you find that a thread is getting mired down with that, skip to a different one. If you want to try it, put on some weights. Load up to where your wing loading on your current canopy is around 1.5. It will be a different animal, but not unfamiliar. You can do this but be smart about it. Your margin of error gets a little bit smaller. The canopy will fly faster. It will be a little twitchier in flight. It won't be a huge difference but it will be there and you'll need to fly it a little more actively. To make this work you will have to be diligent about the things that already make for a safe skydive. Work out your pattern in advance and stick as close as you can to that pattern. Don't do big movements close to the ground. Actively fly it and fly it all the way to the ground. Land with your wing level. This is (hopefully) all stuff you have heard before. It just becomes more important as you downsize. The way to do well with this is to have the mindset that you are going to be a master at the basics.
  17. I think the problem is that during many of your posts you make excuses for your bad behavior and then go right ahead with the bad behavior as if making excuses for it somehow makes it OK. It's not. If you have valuable information, give it. If you think you should probably make an excuse or apologize for something you are about to do, skip it. Kinda like when you're a complete asshole, and then you explain that you're not really being an asshole? Ok, fine, what do you tell someone that wants to drag a six year old girl to a place where the average temp can reach 105, in the shade, for a week??? While I try to get my "B" lic as fast as I can???? This is a recipie for marital bliss?? Seen way to many well intentioned people try to do it all, and the end result is not being anywheeere remotly sucsessfull at anything... C
  18. I have two and they are both conveniently unpacked right now
  19. I did it for a couple of years. The biggest problem I found was that the gear bag (which had backpack straps) got heavy on my shoulders. I worked out a couple of ways to do this. Both of them relied on my resting the bag on either the seat behind me or on the gas tank in front of me. When it was resting on the seat behind me I just had the straps loose and long. When it was in front of me I had the straps pretty tight and the pack up against my chest. That seemed to work better and was my usual method. I think it depends a lot on the motorcycle.
  20. Or punctuation... Or capital letters.
  21. If you are going to drop that on us, drop the name of the DZ. I probably qualify as not being able to jump there because of my canopy.
  22. Point taken. You are absolutely right. Both the jumper/rigger and the pilot will be in deep kimchee if the feds ever figure out that you have an out of date Cypres in your rig. How they would figure that out is a different story and the rigger will probably be in deeper kimchee but if he did go get his rigger's ticket and then put a (possibly) out of date Cypres in there he would be endangering the pilot's ratings. "No pilot in command of an aircraft....." Well (in the US) you do involve the Pilot when jumping....
  23. Assuming your container manufacturer has not banned them, I'm voting Argus. You can get them cheap and if you are only going to turn it on for gear checks and (maybe) turn it off, the battery will last forever. There are a couple of DZs that won't allow them. Skydive AZ is one of them. OR, get your rigger's ticket and a Cypres 1. Just don't ever loan out your gear. Seriously, if you do questionable stuff with your own gear, that's one thing. If you involve anyone else, that is MUCH more of a problem.
  24. If they are signed and you can show them the log, bring it and talk with your instructor. Jumps are jumps. You will still have to go through all of the training and pass all of the license requirements and tests but the jumps count towards your jump numbers. Don't transfer anything. The signatures are important. I still have my first card somewhere and kept it in a log book. Start your log book with #5 or whatever it was and keep the card folded (maybe laminated?) with your book for now. Don't throw the old one away. Welcome back!
  25. My first thought when I was reading this was that every one of us had a sticking point that took us a little while to work through. Some of them were procedural, some of them were more mental. One of my first ones was mostly mental. I was scared to death on my first 8 or 10 jumps and would perform terribly. I'd get through it but I was not relaxed and I rushed things. I "got" a couple of concepts and things improved dramatically. Keep skydiving. This is just a sticking point. You'll have others when you start learning advanced techniques but you'll have trained yourself to work through them.