DexterBase

Well spoken, Tom.

He'll be staying with Katie and me. I'll cover Faber's pin if you want to tack it onto the two I already need.

I disagree. Most BASE jumpers I know don't even know or care about the BASE forums online. Most of them are pretty active so at least with the jumper I know, this will be a very inaccurate survey. I don't have an alternative to offer, it's just very hard to keep track of an inherently secretive activity.

I strongly disagree with any effort to "de-humanize" the List. I think it has more weight to the BASE community if you can attach a name and face to a fatality description. The purpose of the list is to remember the ones who have gone in, help other jumpers learn from their mistakes in an attempt to prevent the same things from happening again, and show new jumpers the hazards they face. I think reading the list and seeing the faces of the ones who have died is far more likely to give them pause, and make them really consider what they're getting into, than looking at a couple bar graphs and statistacal anaysis stuff instead. If Nick doesn't want to do it anymore, hell, I'll learn something about computers and take it over for him. Just because others misuse the List doesn't make it any less important to the people it was designed for, us BASE jumpers.

That would be perfect! Thanks brutha!

Right on, how can I send you payment for two?

That's so nice of you. What are the words printed on the pin with? Are they engraved or anything like that?

Over New Years weekend, Kmonster and I flew from Seattle to Sacramento with our rigs on our backs (not in stashbags) and had our helmets in our hands. Not a word was said about it.

The first photo is the attachment shown with my cell phone for scale. The second photo shows the spectra tied to the bridle with a dedicated length of breakcord. The third photo shows the dacron looped over the anchor point and the ends of the red dacron tied to the bridle with a dedicated piece of breakcord. In that photo series, there are two pieces of breakcord being used. The system is very effective with a downside of not being super abrasion resistant. I think the material to build one costs me several pennies and it takes about three minutes to make one so they're fairly disposable to me. I jump one until it starts showing a bit of abrasion damage then I just can it and make another one. A positive aspect is that I can build it to a custom length to suit whatever object I'm using as an anchor point. If it's a handrail I use the short length in the picture. If the anchor point has more girth to it, then I can build a longer attachment in about the same time it takes me to stow my lines.

There's no need to have that attitide here. Questions like yours are precisely what this forum was created for. Thanks for asking!

Here's a post I made in the other static line thread. It details the system I have been using very successfully.

Okay, here's a couple pics of my static line attachment for BASE jumping. I usually just girth hitch the spectra to the bridle since the short loop of dacron entangling with anything is no more likely than the bridle and PC themselves. If it is still a concern, just attach the thing with a loop of breakcord. Once the attachment is rigged to the bridle, loop the red dacron over the handrail or anchor object so that the white extension faces away from the object. This is so that when the breakcord parts the dacron will "whip" away from the object. Tie the two ends of the dacron to the bridle with a single loop of 80 pound breakcord. When you tie the knot, take all the slack out of the loop of breakcord. If you're doing a lower jump where you want redundancy you can add a longer loop routed through the same points, just make it long enough that the first loop must break before the backup loop can be loaded. I use two different materials to build the SL attachment to reduce the chances of misrigging something in the dark. It's simple: tie the two red ends to the bridle and face the white part away from the handrail. Any more questions or anything I can explain better?

After working a 12 hour shift at work, I drove 730 miles from Seattle to pick up my girlfriend at her college in Montana, then we continued on to Twin Falls the same day for a total of 1080 miles (I did all the driving). We got there just in time for me to pack a rig and we did a dawn load. We stayed and jumped for two days then I did the trip again backwards. I think we got in about ten or twelve jumps that weekend. We did this every other weekend for a month and a half, with small variations. Sometimes we'd meet in Twin Falls. I'm sure glad we live together now! Edit: I left a couple details out, now added for dramatic effect.

We brainstormed this problem a year or two ago and came up with this which seems to work really well. I have been building them out of Dacron and spectra. I have jumped it a bunch and it works exactly the way it's supposed to. Super clean, super simple, and very easy to rig up. I will post pics of my setup in the morning (I'm at work) when I get home. If you have some dacron, spectra, a finger trapping tool and a sewing machine you can build one in a couple minutes or I could build one for ya.

That is fine. You can lengthen the loop a bit to get lower tension or you can use a closing loop made of spectra. If you use a spectra closing loop, it's quite hard to get a high pin tension. I've tried all kinds of silly stuff and shortened the closing loop so that the rig would barely close. With the spectra loop, the pin would still pop before the rig would move. If you're interested in experimenting, I'll mail out some spectra closing loops to interested BASE jumpers in exchange for taking me to one of your local objects when I'm in your neck of the woods. Any BASE jumpers desiring their free set of "DexterBASE Rigging" spectra closing loops PM me with your address. (BASE jumpers outside the US will obviously be on a case by case basis.) First 30 inquiries will get them- that means I have to build sixty closing loops. No worries, they only take a minute to make. Edit: Oh yeah, Tom, I'll mail your out tomorrow I promise. They've been sitting by my sewing machine since the day we talked about them.

It's just a slider built with a finer mesh for higher drag.

I remember one particularly windy jump I made last Labor Day weekend. Tom, I believe your exact words were: "Well, it's your life. More importantly, it's your ankles." It can be very windy on Labor Day weekend. At any rate, barring war with Iran or N. Korea, I plan to be in TF for both Memorial Day and Labor day this year.

Yes, you can do that.

Interesting... I'll have to remember that for future BASE jumps. I could pretty much care less what certain people think about BASE jumping. One such group is a bunch of college kids who think life is all about drinking and doing drugs. We all know life is only partially about those things. The second group, and the group whose opinion of BASE jumping I value absolutely the least, is the ones who surf gore sites getting their jollies off of the suffering of others. How ignorant some people are about the sport really puts into perspective how much I've learned about BASE inthe last seven or eight years.

I agree with everything you said. Still I can think of many more accurate words to describe skydiving than "safe". Surfing the internet: safe Watching TV: safe Playing golf: safe shooting pool: safe bowling: safe rock climbing: not safe scuba diving: not safe BASE jumping: absolutely not safe Skydiving: sorry, not safe I'm not saying it's not manageable as far as risk goes. All risks can be managed but your post asked if the sport is safe. It's just not. To try and prove otherwise is futile, I'm afraid. Edit: You know after some thought something occured to me. If you have to wear a harness and a helmet, what you're doing is not safe.

I have a floating handle on my Asylum 38" AV ZP PC. After playing with it for a while, I came to the conclusion that I don't really like it so I just took it out. The way I pack my PC, the 38 gives me a nice, positive grab without the handle floating inside. I use a super mushroom on all my jumps and I don't see a way to make the internal handle useful while packing like that. I do like an external handle on the 32 though. Just be sure the handle is secured at both ends in a way that the bridle cannot get hooked under the end of it, or tie off around it. I think the best way I've seen this accomplished is to use a PVC tube secured to the apex by passing a piece of webbing through the center and tacked down on both ends. Hackey handles are BAD in BASE. No handle on my 42 and 46" AV ZP pilot chutes. All my PC's are from Asylum.

It'll be interesting to see if they issue a service bulletin to fix the problem on other rigs that are being jumped in the field. I'm sure many jumpers are happily jumping away not even knowing a potentially fatal flaw exists on their gear. I love seeing a manufacturer identify a problem and then take active steps to prevent it from causing an incident.

You are paying to ride an airplane to an altitude of thousands of feet above the ground. You are going to intentionally jump out of the airplane and directly into a very dangerous situation: If you don't decelerate to a very slow speed before hitting the ground you will die. In order to accomplish this deceleration, your plan is to toss a small parachute into the air. Attached to this small parachute is a larger parachute basically consisting of a square patch of nylon and several small diameter lines. If these items, which have been deployed into airspeeds around 120 miles per hour, don't work in a reasonably controlled fashion they will malfunction and you will not decelerate enough to survive the imminent impact with the ground. You can cut away the first one and try the same thing again. If the second (and last) option doesn't work exactly as expected, you will not decelerate enough and you will die. Even if it all works properly and the chaos of deployment culminates in a flying and controllable parachute over your head, you can still be killed if you make errors in landing it. To me, that doesn't fall into the "safe" category.

Since a great majority of my BASE jumping is done slider down and below 500 feet, these are two qualities I don't want to see in my BASE canopies. I like the turn rate and responsiveness of my BlackJack and sometimes I need every ounce of flare that thing has. In what delay range (slider up) were off heading problems being seen? Were the off heading openings more frequent than other BASE canopies? Before I do the mod on my BlackJack canopies, I'd like to know exactly what I'm gaining by giving up that 5% of my bottom end. I've never had a problem with headings on slider up jumps, even on short delays. I will probably end up doing the mod since that's what CR and Asylum are recommending, but I'd like to know more about the trade-offs. Also, the mod is only to the upper control lines correct? I heard talk of a new lineset but I was under the impression that everything else about the trim of the canopy was good to go. I know CR is now building the sliders wider than the original generation of BlackJacks (Ace too I suppose).

There may be some red wine showing up this weekend with a couple jumpers I know. Hope you can play with us.