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Showing content with the highest reputation on 12/04/2021 in all areas

  1. 3 points
    Reach out to the dropzone he jumped at, his rigger, or friends he jumped with. They will be able to steer you in the right direction. There are many factors that go into pricing equipment, beginning with a thorough inspection of all components. Age and number of jumps play into the value, as well as popularity of each component. Don't try to price online, someone you trust needs to have eyes on the equipment. I'm sorry for your loss.
  2. 2 points
    Kenzdik96 - Thank you, I will double stow!! Bigun - Awesome... Videos are worth a million words! Much thanks all !!! I'm pretty squared away now. I just need to practice, practice... practice!! Tim
  3. 1 point
    We are kinda into pinball. Played a fun game at a pinball event last month - Black Knight Sword of Rage. We already have the original Black Knight (circa 1980); SOR came out in 2019 and is the third in the BK series (the other one came out in the late 1990's - Black Knight 2000). We kinda liked it. Like, so much that even though we swore we didn't need another game and we didn't want to buy a newer game cuz new games suck, we started looking for one. There were none nearby, but I found one at a good price and it was only 2650 miles away in North Carolina. I heard that the leaves are pretty there this time of year and we didn't get a vacation last year and we are both impulsive as all hell, so I contacted the guy. He thought it was a fun idea and wanted to play along so he was willing to hold it for us to get there. Hubby got the time off work, we planned some cool stops along the way, hooked up the trailer and 10 days after contacting the guy, we were eastbound. I40 from Barstow to Little Rock, a bunch of side roads down to Fordyce, Arkansas, more side roads into Alabama and Georgia, Chattanooga to see Lookout Mountain battlefield park, then up to Asheville, N.C. The drive home was I40 west all the way from Asheville back to California. Stayed at one motel (Russellville, Alabama) and two nights at an RV park (Asheville); every other night was either in a rest area or a WalMart parking lot. Trip tidbits - There were at least 5 trucks to every car on I40 between Barstow and Oklahoma City. Route 66 has some fun and free things to stop and look at. It is impossible to see the 7 cool places you planned to see when you have 10 days to drive over 5200 miles, so we had to be happy with seeing an old friend (Lindsey - dz.commer from way back) and a Civil War battlefield instead of the Jack Daniels distillery, a National Park, an old friend, a pinball museum, a presidential library and two Civil War battlefields. Always put new tires on your travel trailer before leaving for a 5200 mile trip so you don't have to replace them all, one at a time, along the way. North Carolina apple cider is out of this world delicious. We ran out of superlatives seeing the autumn colors.in the Smoky Mountains. The people we bought the machine from had 10 others in their basement arcade - had to sell it because they didn't have room for it anymore. Truckers with refrigeration units who park right next to RV's in WalMart parking lots overnight are assholes. So was the new toy worth the trip? Ummm... yeah..... Check it out! Would we do it again? If we could take 3 weeks instead of 10 (okay, 11) days, absolutely. The really bad part of the trip was driving by so much cool stuff, especially after hours long delays caused by road work or truck accidents that took time we could have spent stopping there. TL;DR Drove 5300 miles round trip to buy a pinball machine that we could have found within a couple hundred miles from home because we are impatient and impulsive and we would do it again. Here's some pictures.
  4. 1 point
    Some thoughts on evaluating risk in skydiving. We all evaluate risks, every single day. But we evaluate risks differently when it's something we want to do, rather than something we don't want to do. Four things you can do with risks normally are to avoid, mitigate, share, and accept. In each case, in order to make an intelligent decision, you have to understand the pieces of the risk, and the consequences. And in each case, if you want to be thorough (and when you're talking about high speed impact with the earth, it pays to be thorough), you should start by taking a contrarian view to what you kind of want. The 4 things come in that order because generally, those offer the easiest or cheapest way to navigate around risk. It's generally cheapest (whether money, injury, whatever) just not to do it; next is mitigating, because then you have to understand it, and it's in your control still. Accepting it is last -- often that just means "shit happens," and shit happens fast in skydiving. Try not to go there. In other words, if you really don't want to do something, get someone who thinks you should to enumerate the reasons why, and consider them honestly. If the consequence is loss of friendship or macho points, that's different from injury or death. And if you really want to do something, get someone who thinks it's a bad idea to enumerate the reasons why, and consider them honestly. They are potential costs of doing it, and might have to be paid for. Got insurance? Got a job with sick leave? That might enter into whether you want to start swooping or downsize, because injury is a very honest possible consequence of skydiving, and downsizing will generally increase the chances of injury. Even if you're good. Mitigating might include getting additional formal training in a new canopy or skill (CRW camp, finding a mentor). It might include starting swooping with a larger canopy than you currently own. It might include limiting you who are willing to skydiving with. But regardless, it means understanding the components and consequences honestly, and not with rose-colored glasses or an unwarranted spirit of optimism. And in skydiving it generally means taking an action, or specifically avoiding one. Mitigating can include running through emergency scenarios in your mind, and considering what you would do in that case. What happens if someone cuts you off? What happens if it happens at 50 feet instead of 200 feet? How about if you end up in someone's back yard? Risk sharing? Not sure how well that applies in skydiving. The consequences of a bad decision are rarely lessened when they're shared -- it only means more people are damaged... And accepting should mean that you've seriously considered the risks and are just saying "I'll go for it, with no additional preparation." Which might be just fine, if you really are ready, or if the consequences are supremely unlikely (like an asteroid hitting your canopy, not like dropping a toggle). Or it might just be an immature way of saying "the heck with it, I'm going for it, and assuming that there will be no consequences." Refer to my tag line... Wendy P.
  5. 1 point
    Correct. It does not apply to handguns to minors.
  6. 1 point
    From your description, you may mean former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clark. He's well known for sporting a fairly elaborate pin collection. https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/why-does-sheriff-david-clarke-sport-an-israeli-traffic-police-pin-1.5474413 He's a major douche. And as far as the parents of the shooter... Wow. Give a kid a gun for Christmas*. When the school calls saying he was looking for ammunition on his phone at school, tell him 'don't get caught'. There are many cases where the parents did all they could to control and properly teach their kid. This isn't one of them. * - There is a 'gift exemption' on the firearms purchase/background check form. For example, it would be legal for me to purchase a gun intending to give it to my wife for Christmas. However, this exemption would NOT apply to this situation.
  7. 1 point
    And his Mom has a My Son is an Honor Sheriff bumper sticker, probably.
  8. 1 point
    ..and the argument that the pressure bump was not an oscillation is nonsense. Oscillations are a visual representation of pressure fluctuations,, the needle fluctuated on the gauge. When the needle fluctuation reached a max, the oscillation was physically felt aka pressure bump. The difference between the two is not that they are separate events but in how a fluctuation is sensed.. physical vs visual. The question was whether the oscillations were caused by Cooper going down the stairs or jumping. The sled test showed that there was no significant change when a person went down the stairs. The sled being dropped matched the "pressure bump" felt on NORJAK.. a violent increase in oscillations ending with a bump. This is not minutes apart, but seconds. Rataczak.. The pressure gauge is used for the crew to regulate the rate of climb or descent in the cabin to make it more comfortable. They were unpressurized and when that gauge goes to the extreme a light goes on and you feel a significant bump in your ears like a car door window opening at 70 mph on the highway. He said on the radio "I think our friend just took leave of us.... mark it on your radar screen" Get it,, a fluctuation is seen as an oscillation on the gauge, an extreme fluctuation is felt as a pressure bump..
  9. 1 point
    You might check out this packing video from PD. The line stows part starts at the 21:00 minute mark
  10. 1 point
    I would recommend using regular rubber bands and double stowing everything, and not worrying about the pull force that much. Hear me out. Single stowing can produce sufficient force on majority of the lines, but (speaking about locking stows) the line that sits on the bottom touching the grommet isn't as tensioned as the rest of them, nor does it have sufficient friction and can fall out much easier. If it falls out, it can wrap around something and cause a bag lock. As for the non locking stows, they are touching the rubber all around, but if you are using the same rubber bands for everything, they are going to be too loose to single stow for the non locking ones. You could use smaller rubber bands and single stow for the non locking stows, but that means keeping spares of both sizes, and that sucks. The most important thing is that your lines disconnect from the stows in the correct order. Bag locks aren't fun, line dumps even less so. Pull force is secondary to that. I would also recommend getting a semi stowless. Much easier to pack, better openings, less chance of a bag lock. If they are good enough for your reserve, they should be good enough for your main.
  11. 1 point
  12. 1 point
    I’ve done 3500 jumps, mostly tandem since having a knee replaced. It has never been a factor, and my birthday coincides with the cooling of the earth’s crust.
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