Release cable housing

[lazyfrog 0]

I have a Talon 1 rig, and would like to know if there is any problem for jumping my rig in the US with this rig, as I still have the release cable housing in nylon fabric, and not in metal "shower tube"

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Fumer tue, péter pue
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ourson #10, Mosquito Uno, CBT 579

[scotts 0]

Soft housings are still allowed, but don't be surprised when your rigger and other jumpers tell you that you should have hard housings installed. Kit from RI was $20 usd last year when i got mine, plus whatever your rigger charges to install them.

[riggerrob 643]

Let's get our terminology straight here. Rigging Innovations was not very good about labelling rigs in the early days. All the Talon "Mark Is" built between 1984 and 1994 had metal release housings.
Sounds like you have a '94 Talon or a Talon 2 )introduced in 1997), in "T1" size.
Most '94 Talons have soft housings, similar to the Flexon. The difficulty with that pattern of soft housings was that few skydivers had the patience to read what the manual said about routing the left cable around the back of the neck. It was fussy procedure that required some fancy wiggles.
I retrofitted metal housings to dozens of '94 Talons when I worked at R.I.
When we introduced the Talon 2 in 1997, we started with "hybrid housings" which were metal across the back of the neck, but still had fabric ends.
Even hybrid housings vastly simplify the process of inserting release cables.
I still have this configuration on my Talon 2, built in 1997.
Soft housings got a bad reputation for two reasons: routing and riser pinch. SunPath did not publish a diagram - showing how to route cables - until something like three years after they introduced soft housings. This resulted in hundreds of Javelins with miss-routed cables. Properly routed cables only required 5 pounds to pull, while miss-routed cables required a 25 pound pull.
The other problem - that we did not understand at the time - was riser pinch.