RiggerLee

When it inflates and it bulges and the ribs shift and every thing else, all canopies shrink from side to side. You might say that it gives you the true aspect ratio. I'm not sure it's really important. Even in the simplest modeling of this there is another number in there. It's one of the fudge factor coeficents that we use. It basically relates to the eficentcy of the plane form. Basicly it's how close the lift distribution comes to the ideal of an elips. It's like drag or lift coefecents. It just get's absorbed into the fudge numbers. So eaven if you measure things a little weird it all still works out as long as you do it the same way EVERY time. On the other question What do they care if the numbers compare. No one has ever been perticuarly eager to be compared to there compediters on an even playing field. They just want to be perceived as having some advantage. Example: Clothing. Ask your girl friend how big is a size 8 dress is? Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Actually there can be problems with curved pins. I posted something about this on base jumper.... http://www.basejumper.com/cgi-bin/forum/gforum.cgi?do=post_view_flat;post=2964578;page=4;sb=post_latest_reply;so=ASC;mh=25; It was a comment in relation to a towed PC. The main descusion is about pin cover flap design. I also posted some pictures of bent pins, I think they are on the next page. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

The idea is still around. Look at some of the new CRW canopies. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

this is not a first or unique ocurance. It never failes to amaze me what people do to perfectly nice rigs. I don't know what they are thinking at the time but I'm sure beer is involved in a lot of these decisions. Funny stories, examples. The marksalot rig. I remember this because of all the drama assoceated with it. Same kind of shit. This guy had colored in the stripes on his javelin. I think they had been pink. Ugly as sin. It was one of those rigs dropped off for a repack and then never reclaimed. I take that back I think the guy came back about a six months after I repacked it. I recall he got all pissed off when I told him it was out of date. The I think he called back about a year later and we went through that again. So now he owed me for two repacks. Then it got passed to Tom who wound up paying for his 4 year and a repack then a year later the guy calls back the night before the biggest boogie of the year wanting to know if it can be ready for the first load the next day, this was about 7:00 at night, and of course it needed new batteries. Maybe I'm getting it all confused there may have been another near miss of us almost getting payed. But by the end he was into us for... I think it was five or six hundred dollars. And then he was MIA again. Couldn't find the guy couldn't contact him and we're like three or four years into this debockal by now. In the end we decided that he had eather quit the sport or just fucking died and we didn't care which. So Tom was stuck with all this money out of pocket and a god awefal ugly rig. In the end we wound up rebuilding it, replacing the stripe flap, leg pads, etc. And Tom had him self a pretty nice looking rig. And that is how Tom got his Velocity Sportsware rig. Another fun story. The Glitter rig. Mary Ann. If you knew Marry Ann you'll apreceate this story. Another Javelin. I don't know why people pick on pore defenceless javelins. Apparently one night She got the idea in her head that it would be cool to make her rig sparkle. I'm shure there were drugs involved in this decision. It was actually a perfectly nice javelin and I don't think she even changed the colors but it just wasn't freefly enough for her. It just wasn't sparkly and so comes the glitter. Yes, Mary Ann was a glitter girl. She glued glitter on her reserve cover flap, strips flap, and the exposed quadrants of her pilot chute. And so was born the glitter rig. Again it wasn't a "structural" part of the rig. It didn't interfear with it's operation. Yes, I checked, she did not get any glue under the flaps and glue it closed but... Alcohol and drugs. It's the only explanations I can come up with other then, well you would have to have known Mary Ann. I hated packing that rig. Glitter every where. It just shed it continuesly and endlessly. She must have kept reaplying it. I miss her if only for the laughs she provided us. Some of the coolest mods like this that I have seen were on Racers. I don't know the guys name but he painted some really great art work on Racer pop tops. Not only was he actually a really good artest but they held up pretty well. He went out and found the right paints and if you took care of them they would last. Those pop tops were actually hands down really cool. Just a few of the more entertaining stories. I just want to know what they thought when they woke up the next day after there bended. Did they look at the rig and say who the hell did that? Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

When I was a young student, this would have been around my tenth or twelve'th jump. My instructor noticed that I had my chest strap miss routed. He proceeded to tell me not one but two stories of watching, personally, some one spend there intire life trying to reroute there chest strap in free fall. This was pre cypress, pre go pro and the out come was not pretty. Just saying it's not new, very easy to have happion, nad has killed before. As to the necessaty of the chest strap... It appears to me that he took the opening shock cradeled on his back by the rig. Which might explane why he was not dumped out. I don't know what would have happioned if it had fired with him on his belly and I'm not drawing any conclusions about the need for the chest strap. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Not to be nit picky but I think you mean type 7 and type 8. 12 is some times used as a buffer strip and contacts one side of the hardware. I'm not sure if it's a variation in the thickness that has caused more slipping. There is a lot of variation in the resin coating of condition R webbing and I think it may be a product of the difference if stiffness rather then actual thickness. I actually wouldn't mind seeing other plating options explored. There are some really cool technologies that have come around that we are just ignoring. I think it would be a really cool project. Now having said that I think it's a project that should be taken on by some of they foundries that make the hard ware. I don't think takeing a set of condition three down to a shop and having some thing exotic done and testing it by sewing it into your harness is the way to do it. Why explore these things? Some of the things we are doing right now are or potentially can be problematic. Example. We were really pushing the limits on a release and we started doing some destructive testing. We were breaking the RW-9, big ass heavy three ring, at around 16,000 pounds. Then one of them broke at 7,000 lb. What the fuck. I was talking to the guys from Borden about it and they got all excited. Although this peace was made by Forge Craft they make the same peace of hard ware. When I showed it to them they were able to identify obvious signs of hydrogen embritalment. The point is that this is some thing that made it through the QC process of a major manufacturer. You can have some real issues with this stuff. We need some better, less invasive, options. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

In fairness to Sherman I will clarify. I was referring to a recovery system. It's for a suborbital sounding rocket rated for reentry from 350,000 feet. We're trying to do it with a two stage system going directly from the reentry ballute, think drogue, to the main. We had a problem when we had an early abort do to a guideance failure. So it was a low altitude, high speed, heavy abort. We had over 2500 lb of snatch force on the bag rather then the expected 1000 lb of force lifting the bag. The real problem was the connecter links. We have eight 15,000 lb drag chute links that hold the lines on the risers. They weigh about 10 lb. They were tied to the bottom of the bag with 80 lb break cord along with bites of the ten foot long risers. But with the 33 g acceleration of the bag that was not enough to lift them and the stayed behind stripping the risers and lines off of the bag with out leaving the pack tray. The canopy deployed and then the rocket fell the remaining ten feet to riser streatch. Ka bam. blew out several cells bottom skin and top skin. There was just a grid work of reinforcing tapes on that part of the canopy. Cool thing was WayMores AGU compensated and flew it back to withen 50 meters of the target. So unless you are working with hypersonic deceleraters at over mach 4 with 2,500 lb of snatch force (and I don't think even Sherman will claim that on his pilot chute) and have 15,000 lb drag chute links on your risers... you should be fine. I hope this clarifies what I mean by an extreame situation. In short I fell fully confident endorsing Mr. Shermans Speed Bag for all normal deployment regimes that even the fastest free flyer or speed diver will face. It was just that one oppsy. We fixed it by spiting the two riser groups and tieing them seperetly with muttible wraps of 80 break cord to lift the links along with the bag to riser streatch. Problem solved. Just a minor hiccup in the learning curve. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Woha, 3/4? New moter for your 7 class? Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

The speed bag Does work. I can testify to this. I blatently stole the idea for another project. It's about the best staging you can hope to get with out getting radical. Con is that they are a bit of a pain to pack. Perticuarly if the canopy is too big for the bag or you are not competent enough to get it into the bag. They are not tolerant of the big blob hanging out technique of packing which is bull to begen with. And for the record. As good as it is. You can still have a line dump. I know because I managed it. It was an extream enough situation that I doubt any one here could reproduice it. But just saying. Yes, there has been a line dump on a speed bag. I work with screamers. You have to keep in mind that the amount of energy absorbed is a product of force over elongation. So to really be meaningfull they have to extend a lot or be really stiff. Do the math on the percentage of energy absorbed. Dacron lines as an example just don't have that much give. I think the benefit is more from improved staging, the rubber bands held them, as opposed to specter, where the rubber bands and tube stowes did not. It might also tame the slider a bit. I don't think you will see a tecnilogical fix to this. And you wouldn't want it if we had one. Most hard openings are radically asimetric. You would create a malfunction extending one side with out the other. I think the focas should be on prevention. Improving the staging. Dome slider, pockets around the edges of the slider, magnets on the slider, Dacron or hma lines, better stows, better bags, canopy design. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

How are you gathering your rate of decent data? If you are using a static pressure port and differentiating it in the data or a VSI then the altitude and rod are not relative to the air mass. The only way to measure is relative to the air mass you are traveling through would be with an actual vain calibrated rrelitive to the horizon. This would actually give you glide directly and some things like this have actually been done. but if your doing what I think you're doing with just a reading from a pressure altimeter then your rod data will be affected by thermals and this could quear your data if you don't have enough repetition of each test to compare them and filter out the anomallys. And what break settings on the graph do each of the points you have marked refer to? How many inches of break at each one? Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Oh, this brings back sweet memories of near death expereances. I've done a number of things like this. Mostly we used things like this for CRW. We found a number of different ways to try to kill our selves under canopy with such devices. I am not advocating but god damn it's fun. Chest strap? No there are better places to load. Opening shock... yes we've done things like this. Remember it's more about airspeed then weight. Could you break thing if you tried hard enough? Shure. But if you're intelligent... Again I'm not saying it's a good idea but we did get away with it. As an example what we did was to do a low speed horizontal opening right out of the plane. Then he hooked up a rope. cut away and actually repelled down 30 ft and we transferred him to another canopy so that he was doing a mister bill with him, we were afraid of the opening at such a high wing loading with the second canopy, and rapped right off the end of the rope. They just sank away with the higher wing loading. That VX sure flew fast at over 5:1. Good times and dumb stories. I'm surprised we're still alive. Wait, most of the people I knew are dead. I guess that could be an object lessen. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Hmmm. There's some stuff I could really pick you apart on. It's tempting because not only are you wrong but you're up there screaming these things from the roof tops and I'm not sure every one here can edit out your misconseptions. But I'll make you a deal. I wont nag you about your math if you give me a pass on my spelling. There are some things I would like for you to clarify. How exactly are you getting your points across speed ranges? The way this would normally be done is by changing the elevator angle so that the plane is trimmed at different speeds. It's a stable steady state airspeed and you get a very nice range of sink rates vs airspeed. How were you chosing your data points? You seemed to be paying a lot of attention to how it dived in a turn. That isn't really a representation of it's glide across airspeeds. He needs to just fly in a straight line for thirty sec at a time at different break settings. With ten points like that you should get much smoother data then what you seemed to have there. I'd like to see glide plotted relative to break setting. I'm not sure what conditions you did this under but I don't see how your addressing thermals which could be as hard to filter out of your data as wind speed from gps data. Unless you have a nice inversion layer that you can play above you can probably only do a jump like this on the first load of the day at dawn. It makes me wonder if some of the variation you see in between jumps is from this. If you catch a thermal, even a small one, with that tandom or one of the larger canopies it could make your glide look really good. You really need multible jumps on each canopy. In theory glide should not vary with wing loading. If I put on a forty lb weight vest my canopy should maintain the same glide just at a higher airspeed. I mention this because I've done this and it does. There could be some small losses in efficentcy do to seam leakage at higher wing loadings etc but these are minor unless you're Bruno. It seem that what you really compairing there is the size of canopies. If the same guy jumps two different sizes of canopies of the same make. that is not a compairison of two different wing loadings. There are a lot of things that don't scale as you change the size of the canopy. Large canopies fly much better then small canopies at equivalent wing loadings. Apples and oranges. Another nice graph that people might like to see would be the results including wind. First you'd have to correct the data down to a standard altitude. Then you can do a circular plot for best distance vs crab angle for a given wind, wing loading, and break setting. A set of graphs like this is what you are really facing in a real world setting. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Those are pretty good. But I have actually seen worse then that. And it was on a reserve. Cotton thread and the stiching varied between 4 and 50 stitches per inch. At Quency we saw shit from every corner of the world. Standards... vary. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Shackles like that came out of the sailing industry. They come in all shapes and sizes. Look there. Odds are you'll find things like that. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I'm not a fan of death ravens but if it's got the harring bone tape then it's really not one. With proper line attachments it's structurally sound. They're prone to hard openings but it's a reserve. That's not the end of the world for a reserve. They can stall pretty hard but I've only seen that in ones that were over loaded and over flared. It's not my favret canopy but they do work. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

It's a bummer that cypress doesn't have the ability to easily down load information. They can do it at ssk but it's not normally bothered with except in fatalities. We've been doing a lot of work with vigil and one of the cool things about it is the way you can pull some really good data out of it from the last jump. We've been using one as just a data recorder and it's cool to see the aborts and saves on our rockets from the pressure transduicer. We can get similar data from the GPS and INU but we're looking at incorporating it live into system as an active AAD. Point is that you might be able to get hard data points on the altitude of the activation and the speed or lack there of of the opening. If the cypress hasn't been jumped sence then you might give them a call. They might still be able to pull the data for you. I for one would be interested in seeing those numbers. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

We're getting a little off topic here but I'd love to see your video. If you're taking request here's what I'd like to see. Find a decent size hanging harness stand or go down to the local school and use the swing set. Take a rope from the top of one riser to the other. run it through two pullies spread apart to replicate the angle of the force going up to the two halves of the canopies line set. Remember you will need several feet of rope between the pulley and riser to allow the rsl to extend. You can have the slider on the rope above the riser if you like but it should be able to slide up as normal. Release the left side so that the rls fully extends as it normally would. You should now be hanging cockeyed in the harness with the right side pulled almost off your shoulder and the left pulled way down as you sit asymetricly hanging by to one riser/rsl. You want to film that? That shit would sell me. I'm a native born Texacan but my blood line traces back to Missouri. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Not saying this is a likely scenario, just playing what if here. Say you had a horse shoe malfunction on the main. So let's say you pull the cutaway and the riser manages to pull the pin and extract the tab. If I'm understanding this right in theory you could be towing the reserve pilot chute and bag from the RSL to the main? Even if I'm understanding this right I will concead that this is an odd ball scenario. Whether or not it could happion would be totally dependent on the lengths and geometry involved. But say you got a line around a flap, at the top of the riser, RSL side. Nasty mal. Cut away. You are now basically hanging from this flap/riser. As the riser extends it pulls the tab. Now all forces in any direction are carried by the loop and every thing is towing from the flap. If I'm miss understanding how the system works please correct me. And I agree that there are a lot of "if's" in that. Even if I'm right it's a really odd ball kind of scenario. I just see the movement towards mards and things like this as adding a lot of complexity. That adds potential failure modes. I mean we really didn't think a bag falling out till that tandom pair killed the fuck out of them selves with that sky hook. Who would have ever thought they would have wound up in that corner of the envelope. What I'm describing is just as odd but something like that happioned, or so we think, to a jumper here in TX sans mard. Any system is a compermise between choices. In the end you wind up trying to pick the options that will kill the fewest people. And people will die there's no question about that. But we do try to pick the pathes that will give you the best chances of survival. It bugs me some times when people in their efforts to sell their ideas/products refuse to acknowlage the other side of the scale and I'm speaking in general here. Mostly they just don't want to scare people but that's not the best way to make informed decisions. And for the record I'm not strictly opposed to mards. In fact I'm a big proponent of them in some cases. Like tandoms. Yes, I use an example of a tandom fatality and then turn around and advocate that all tandams should have some form of mard system. It's not hypocrocy, it's the scale thing again. I think they're worth it. Just tossing it out there. Now tell me why I'm stupid. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Shure. I've got a roll of webbing on the shelf. You just have to build a whole new harness! Actually it may not be that bad. You just have to replace that section. So on a multi ring harness It might be easy. Find a good master rigger or send it back. It's an easy fix for the factory. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

The Racer RSL is odd. At least in it's factory configuration. It's goes from one riser to the other like a cross connecter behind your neck. Personally I think that a little fucked up in and of it self. But the idea, at least as I under stand it is that if you break one riser theoretically the rsl will not fire the reserve. It sounds great but I don't really buy it. Again I was there at PIA Sunday morning was slow so I went to take a look at the mill version of their rig. There was only a few of us so there was plenty of opertunity to pester her with questions. I asked her if the rsl would actually work that way. She said yes but when she disconnected the left side and lifted the rig up by it the reserve popped.I was surrounded by a room of racer proponents who tend to be zelots and they started to say that that was not really a fair test but I don't buy it. If you think about it that side of the canopy will just rise up. One or one and a half cells will be angled upwards but the rest will still be suspended just like before bearing load. The rsl will be running straight up from the other riser at an angle towards that half of the canopy and it will be bearing almost half the body weight. I just don't se the geometry working. Maybe if you lost the right side and you had enough slack in the ripcord, but the racer has a pretty long yoke. I'm still skeptical. So I don't buy the you're safe if the riser breaks thing. In fact I think you're doubleing the odds of a problem because now you have issues with both risers. Another odd thing about the design. This is one of those odd ball malfunction modes but it is real. Let's say you go low and the cypress fires just as you pitch your main. People do wind up with dual outs but generally it's the reserve firing while the main is sniveling. So the main winds up in front of the reserve. But let's say you're dirty low and you don't beat the cypress. So now the reserve is in front of your main, that's key. So when you cut away the RSL is looped around the risers and line set of your reserve. This is not obvious. The main is in back so you cut away. Well now the loop formed by your RSL, risers, and slider slides up choaking off your reserve. I remember a picture in skydiving of this, but I think it was a staged thing with a tersh. It is a really odd ball corner of the envelope and I can't recall it actually happioning to any one but it is out there, a product of this odd design. Back when people were talking about this every one wanted to go to a more conventional single sided design. I seem to recall Sherman saying that his RSL was not part of his TSO and could be modified to a simple loop off one riser. It would be nice if Jump shack could conferm this, my memory is imperfect. It also makes the thing a lot cleaner. Normally it runs across the out side of the rig and just tucks under the edge of the cap. Add that exsposure to the list of thing I don't like about the design. I've actually found my self defending Sherman and his designs recently so I had to do something to balance it out. End of Racer RSL rant. Other comments. Testing. I like empirical shit to. I like things you can measure. I like repeatable results with direct corilation to the testing perramiters. And I work in parachute rigging, go figure. I don't think testing is going to be that easy. I think there are too many factors involved. Some of them are not easily repeatable. There have already been some cases where rigs have been sent back in to the manufactorers. And they said they were fine and sent them back. Now you could play the conspearacy theory that they were in stone walling and knowingly sending dangerous equipment back out into the world. I honestly have trouble buying that. Every one I know in this industry has a pretty high since of responcability. The fact is that after they played with it and repacked it a few times it probably was ok. How did they pack the bag? How did the last guy? What was the humidity? FL is different from AZ. You know how a canopy turn into a brick after being left in a truck in the heat of the day and tempiture cycleing at night with the humidity and dew. What about if it's laying on a table with the yoke turned out or tight over a guys shoulder. Is he arching? how tight is the yoke and riser covers? What angle are you pulling at? And that's just one specific rig, and the answer may be different from one to the next. Even with the same container, canopy, every thing. Let's say You have two tall guys. both have small short rigs. But one has stager in the MLW and the other doesn't. Now one rig rides high on his back but the other is lower. It affects the riser covers, the yoke, every thing. One bag might extract and the other wont. Do you see what I mean by a nebulas problem. Short of fundamental changes in direction of some of our design decisions I don't think you can really fix this. And to be honest I'm not shure how big the problem is. In the end it's a question of how many fatalities did this actually play a contributing in. I don't really like the idea of just hucking rigs out the door of a plane, which has been suggested. First off with the rig only weighing 15 lb. it would be rellitivly easy for it to tow a pilot chute and is a good resipy for alarmist reactions. I think you'd need more then just an old cypress. You really need a good altitude unit with acceleramiters and a wire through the cutter to tell you exactly when it was cut to measure opening time, altitude, etc. In any case I'm hungry. So I'm going to go eat. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I was making the rounds at PIA. Stopped by one of the booths. A young woman walked in and started asking about the features of the container. This was obviously a young jumper taking advantage of the expo to check out gear preparing to buy her first. Had two used canopies looking for a container. So the "sales man" I use that work specificly starts in. What does he talk about? Any thing functional, patern sets that will hold her canopies, etc. No. He starts in with embroidery options. Then he moved on to how shiny the hard ware is. I perticuarly liked his speal about how they were sewing the foam on the back pad in an esthetic fashion. And every other goofball bell and whisle the had on the rig. I was trying hard to keep a straight face during all of this. After he was done and she was going to walk away I asked him if I could add a couple of comments. After covering every thing that he blatently ignored I think I may had salvaged the sale for him. But no shit. That was his sales pitch: cool new embroidery, colors, shiny, fancy nonfunctional esthetic sewing, goofball bells and whisles. That's the sales platform today. That's all they are pitching and I guess that's all that people are buying because I am talking about one of the top selling manufactorers. Do we have a real problem with reserve extraction? We can have a problem. I'm not convenced that it's one problem. I think we have several. And I doubt it's a universal problem with any one design. But depending on the exact pattern set, canopy, packjob, fit of the container over the shoulders, etc I think we could have problems on some rigs. But how do you judge it when it could even depend on the rigger who packed it last. Then theres the question of how often will it really make a difference and how that will balance against what you would lose in staging by going to a more open tray. We had way more open trays in the past. In fact some of the older designs that predate our obsession with estetics were actually much better designs. And of course there is the question of sales. How much loss of market share are you willing to accept in order to build a safer rig? And don't think that isn't a trade off or that designers don't concider it. Why do you think no one buys fucking racers. In the end it is about selling rigs. Why do you think that Booth and javelin and marage and all these other people are king? Why do you think Sherman is religated to a footnote in pointers. I could pick apart some of his math, and he goes off on the wild herrangs about one thing or another and makes him self look like a nut case some times but in the end he isn't dumb. Just because he's a wacko that most people ignore out of hand doesn't mean that he's wrong. It's like this. The world is a pendolum. It swings back and forth. Generally you will have problems at ether end. But in time we retreat from what ever extreme we reach. Have people died? probable. Will more people die? most likely but it wont be that many and unless something really blatant happens to bring it to a head then most of these incedents will be explaned away. But over time as people draw new designs or as exesting ones are tweeked we will slowly start to see more open patterns or better staging designs. Hell maybe we will go back to staging loops in the next generation of containers. But they will eventually work there way out of the system just like all of our other mistakes we've made. I appaude Sherman for trying to bring this to a head. He wants to pop it just like a zit so that the healing process can begin. The problem is that the pendulum is just too heavy to easily kick it back in the other direction. He's gona get squshed, again. Because nobody wants to deal with it. And how could you deal with a problem like this that is just so nebulas and hard to pin down. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

If you want one send me an email. Leadingedgebase@hotmail.com Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

I saw one of your mill rigs at PIA with the magnets all the way down the side. Is the classic sport rig avaloble that way or are you still using Velcro? I have to say that the rig I saw actually looked pretty cool. People have been trying forever to build a downwards opening cover that would not interfear with the reserve tray, as many of the tray type cover popular today tend to do. I wont debate whether earlier designs with the amount of Velcro they contained constituted a functional system or not and the attempts at a velcroless I wont even mention. but the racer I saw actually looked like a practical design. With the magnets the thing actually worked and might constitute the first truly practical alternative to tray type riser covers. It's embarising to say that something on a racer actually impressed me... but it did. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

It's a female thing. I know of one girl that poped an implant. As long as you don't have bolt ons I'd recamend the high placement. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com

Are your b-line slider stops lower on your line set then your a-line attachments? If not you may find your a-line tapes being sucked into your grommets. You might have to add a stop on the A-line. pic 2 makes it look like you might still be just a little narrow on the panels towards the front of your canopy. It's hard to tell with the risers crossed and control input on the rears. You say it's steep? Relitive to what? and why go that way? By the way I think your better off a little steep then a little flat, assuming with in reason. Flat canopies can be short on flare authority with out front riser or extra speed. Got a rig set up yet to jump it? Have you been thinking about the testing you want to do before you eventually commit to landing? By the way, even a small sand bag weight clipped to a toggle will go a long way to bringing the thing down with minimal drift. Lee Lee lee@velocitysportswear.com www.velocitysportswear.com