swimming a stage

[stairman]

when Im swimming a stage,horizontal of course,the bottom hangs down too low to my liking.I use an aluminum 80 but the bottom doesnt float up at all.My lowerclip is wrapped around the handlestrap to take up all the slack,but I still have to hold the bottle up when Im close to the bottom.Anybody ever use a bungie to hold it in line with the body?Have done a few searches to no avail.Would prefer help from someone other than a cavern diver on this one.

[novadiver]

Adding a hitch ring to the bottom corner of your backplate would help hold your stage in position . along with adding a bungie to hold the valve in tight against the body.


But I'm a cavern diver so this might not help.

[Sludge]

Randy, I'm going to ask you a stupid question: does the AL80 have a boot on it? Some boots have a built-in weight.

I've never heard of an AL80 not floating bottom-up. I even use aluminum first stages, and they're still bottom-up.

[stairman]

yea Russell it does have a boot on it.No offense to the cavern divers out here Im just looking for experience.

[novadiver]

yea Russell it does have a boot on it.No offense to the cavern divers out here Im just looking for experience.

No offence taken , I'm actually a wreck diver that dives with a stage often. That's where I got my stage experience. If you want to see rings attached like what I suggested ,Go look at Larry G's back plate

[stairman]

Mike it is a 3000 psi.Ill try it without the boot and have thought of Novadivers idea ofconnecting it to the backplate instead of the waist d-ring but thought it would be a pain to hook or unhook.We went over a few things about stages in fullcave class but I didnt think about this one.Since then most of my dives have been backgass only and am just now reliving this minor inconvinence.

[Line Squirrel]

Luxfer & Catalina tanks have slightly different buoyancy characteristics but I wouldn't think it enough to notice all that much.

FWIW, mine are Luxfers and they are all tail heavy (no boot) when filled to around 2800psi or greater. Less than that and the rear/bottom starts to float.

[Al]

Luxfer & Catalina tanks have slightly different buoyancy characteristics but I wouldn't think it enough to notice all that much.

FWIW, mine are Luxfers and they are all tail heavy (no boot) when filled to around 2800psi or greater. Less than that and the rear/bottom starts to float.

Catalina tanks are really bottom heavy and don't work well as stages. Putting a bicycle inner tube on the tank and adjusting the air in it helps the stage bottle to behave a little better, but is a PITA. I like to add a bit of helium to my stages. 30% helium makes a Luxfer tank behave perfectly.

[Luxrok]

I wrote a post with some nifty pictures. It covers the evolution of how I cane to mount my stage bottles when diving backmount or CCR. Take a read and let me know what you think.

http://www.quietdiver.com/68/an-appr...backplate.html

Hans

[RN]

Catalina tanks are really bottom heavy and don't work well as stages. Putting a bicycle inner tube on the tank and adjusting the air in it helps the stage bottle to behave a little better, but is a PITA. I like to add a bit of helium to my stages. 30% helium makes a Luxfer tank behave perfectly.

I've got a Luxfer and a Catalina as stage tanks and my Luxfer seems to be more tail heavy than my Catalina. Significantly so. I'm in the process of changing tanks around and converting some of my student tanks that are Catalinas into stage tanks and using the Luxfers as student tanks. As for correcting the problem, because my Catalina starts out tail heavy, I'm working on carrying my bottles behind me...but I am diving sidemount so that wouldn't work for backmount. If I were still backmount, I'd try carrying them like sidemount bottles. Clamp a d-ring onto your left bottle close to the front and clip your stage bottle to that.