hackish

I have the sailrite cutter but I find it's too hot for cutting zp/f111. For that I have a small butane powered soldering iron with a blade tip. It works OK but it is a PITA to heat up every time and you have to be careful of where the exhaust outlet is. When I get some spare time I might buy a laser and see how well it works. Oh wait I don't have any spare time! -Michael

The photo above is an icarus slider and they use 2" wide tape for the collapsable part. One suggestion was to hot-knife 0.75" off the tape and fold that edge under for a finished width of 2". In a pinch, yes but prefer to have it look factory original. -Michael

Cool setup Lee, is that a puller installed on a 112w140. I think I'm going to have to steal your idea for the presser foot and make myself a ribbon feeder like that. I assume you or someone silver soldered that part on the presser foot? I could probably TIG weld one on if I made the feeder out of SS. -Michael

The next question is where to get some? I've found 2" wide type 3 tape but the weave is different. This stuff is a 2" version of the stuff used for the edges of a slider. I'm still waiting for a response from bally but have not been having much luck with anyone else. -Michael

Here is the stuff I'm referring to. It's a plain weave. -Michael

I was wondering what people use to install or repair the collapsible slider channels? I've seen the 3" tape folded over and used but manfacturers seem to be using a 2" version of this. Any ideas? -Michael

Another thing that occurred to me is battery chemistry. If it's using lipo cells then the last thing someone wants is a lipo fire if they have a rough landing. What if they get ruptured, is the chemical going to render the rig/reserve unairworthy? -Michael

I like the way you put that Lee. I'm looking for ideas on how to patch something like that that is by your description a "good" repair but by my description doesn't look like ASS in the meantime. Does everyone recommend Rob's method with the slider material or is there some other way? -Michael

That patch was done with some unidentified ripstop nylon. It has about 3/16" ripstop squares and is a fair bit heavier than the normal canopy fabric. As for ripstop tape, pretty sure it was just to allow temporary field repairs. Patch bullet holes in canopies? Despite people saying the glue is acidic it does not test so. Despite people saying it weakens fabric some tests were done on 20+ year old patches and were not able to backup that claim. While I'm not a fan I don't think it's as evil as some people say it is... -Michael

The example itself was only something I had handy. It is in fact not something I'd normally patch. The trouble is with older tandem mains the damage is often a lot worse and sometimes includes the stabilizer fabric tearing where the edges of that wad of reinforcement is. I've seen repairs done using Rob's slider reinforcement method. In my mind something ought to be repaired so it mimics the factory configuration. It just doesn't feel right slapping any ol piece of material on there. I don't know if I can loosen my standards enough to do something like that. I'd rather send a canopy to someone else than put my name on the attached. Maybe I'm not being realistic? -Michael

I wonder if you could get your slider down on the risers with that? -Michael

The attached shows some minor damage in a very common place. This example is only minor but I've also found a lot of tears on the stabilizer fabric itself where it is sewn to the reinforcements. What would be considered the "proper" way to fix damage that occurs in this area? Cutting the whole piece out and rebuilding that part of the canopy seems like a _lot_ of work. -Michael

When you lose a main you wish that you had one but it's not a good cost/benefit proposition. Unfortunately I feel that many of these items are a waste of time and money. In fact a more effective solution would be to have/attend an advanced packing course every couple years to make sure you're not getting sloppy and subsequently reduce your chance of a mal anyway... -Michael

We considered that, but in fact a good proportion of people did not have/want to download several gigs of data. Some even do all of their surfing with a tablet/cell stick so the average 4-6gb of material would eat their monthly limit in 1 shot. On the average non-geek connection you're still thinking of spending an hour or more to download all the data. From a customer point of view they felt better when they got a shiny keychain bottle opener type USB drive than an intangible digital link. Finally, my mom would not have any idea what to do with a download link but she can figure out how to use a USB key. If you ask Dan or Martin I'm sure they could share the source and cost of the drives we get. They come with the logo on it and in a nice little felt drawstring type bag.

TK, We're running peregrine - which uses vegas. We shoot all 1080p with mostly gopro and a few CX sony. I've used video footage from my Canon DSLR as well. The stills are either gopro or DSLR and we include both. The biggest advantage of USB is nearly 0 comebacks. We switched from DVD about 4 years ago and never looked back. The latest USB keys are also pretty fast so writing an average of 4gb of data is a couple of minutes. Since the DZ runs about a 60-70% video rate the throughput has to be high. That means a complete video has to be edited and sent to render in 5 minutes or less. We spent some money on a decent video machine with a good card to use hardware accel during rendering. SSDs, lots of CPU and lots of RAM. Also worth mentioning is a lot of USB3 channels so USB can be written and the next video imported at the same time without bogging it down. I we output in H.264. Someone good running the machine can churn out 50 videos in a day.

Yes. Severed most of the line but left enough behind that you couldn't pull it apart. You can see 3 attempts. Tried that just for you. Complete and utter failure. For whatever reason compressive cutting does not work on vectran. You need something that shears it. See the photo - that barely made a mark on the line. -Michael

Yes I tried those too. Years in the automotive trade means that I have a huge selection of cutting devices. I went through my tool chest trying to find something that worked well. To effectively cut vectran you need something that's sharp and actually shears it. Anything that just compresses a blade against it leaves enough filaments uncut that it's not effective. Some of the best suggestions so far are resharpening a cheap set of scissors and cutting the lines up close to the cascade with a knife. I've got 5 more canopies to reline here and my objective is to get faster at it. So far I'm at 30 min for the line removal and 50 min for installing the pieces. Still have to trap and tack. -Michael -Michael

I tried that. It was far less successful than you'd think. Even with some really good quality sharp cutters it would not even cut a noticeable amount of the line. -Michael

I quite enjoy doing relines because it takes a canopy that nobody wants to jump and puts enough love back into it that the TIs will rush to grab the rig that has the one with fresh lines! I would be interested to your line removal process. I don't have a tacker and doing a nice looking tack on a 20U takes some time. However I just hacked up a needle synchronizer and hopefully it will improve the process slightly. I'm enough of a computer geek that I'll be adding a stitch counter to it too! Backup 12 stitches, Switch to zig-zag and go forward 24. Not center start but it does start on the unloaded end and satisfies the manufacturer requirements. The thing I'm always nervous about is cutting the tacks on the stabs. I take a razor blade and sweep the line itself several times to get the zig-zags then it will spread enough to get a ripper between the line and tape to cut the straight stitches. So far I've gotten complete removal of old lines down to 30 minutes. From there I install all the cascades, then A's and finally C's. Spend a few minutes verifying line lenghts, then trap those and tack the cascades. Install the brake lines, tack those, then the stabilizers and finally do the inspection. It's still a 7h job. Similar process for others? -Michael

No doubt a knife slip would hit the seam on the loaded rib too, just to make a repair more "interesting". Just for kicks I tried to slip the end of the temp pin into the loop on the larks head but couldn't get it in there... At least not without risking damaging the tape and becoming grumpy having to fix things. Do you think this problem is specific to the 1000lb vectran? -Michael

I use orange-handled fiskars. They cost about $8 a pop. Loosen the larkshead just enough to get one point in, and keep the tips close together as you push the blades forward onto the line. So you're never really opening the scissors, and you aren't using your hand strength to cut the line - you're just sliding the two blades across it and letting them do all the work. A couple pretty significant bonuses to using cheap scissors for this: - it's not so heartbreaking when you have to throw them away. - you can also buy cheap scissor-sharpeners (about $15, I think) that work incredibly well on cheap scissors, though they probably are worthless on high quality blades. Sorry for not mentioning the gals too. I have never looked for scissor sharpeners... good idea. I've been using a temp pin to slip into the tape and pulling up tends to loosen the larkshead enough that the cut off loop comes out. Maybe the super tight larkshead is a tandem specific problem. -Michael

I don't have the confidence to bring a box cutter that close to a multi-thousand dollar canopy. Or sometimes in my case a multi-hundred dollar worn out tandem canopy :) -Michael

I've been cutting vectran lines. At first I had a pair of $35 clauss titanium series scissors. After 2 relines they were so dull they wouldn't cut zp nylon. So I paid $70 for some henkels superflection series. These cut better but having cut off only a single set of lines I can already tell they're getting dull. The lines are old, frayed and dirty but not full of sand,mud or anything noticeably abrasive. Is there a better way to remove old lines? A different tool? How do the guys who reline 50+ canopies a year do it? -Michael

I don't think the stats are particularly meaningful unless broken down by canopy type, size. loading and age. Then the sample is generally too small to be statistically significant. Some types of canopies are very malfunction prone. Many times the state of repair also has a big impact. Open a high performance canopy 10000 times with out of trim lines and count the malfunctions and compare it to the same thing that's new with everything in trim and you will see a vast difference. Nearly all my cutaways happened with a Diablo. If you so much as get line twist in that thing it's nearly an automatic chop. -Michael

I'm not sure I agree with the law. I was a witness for a case like that once so it's not an old unused law. Owner had done a nice burnout before the party and broke the driveshaft so I had to go up on the stand to say there is no possible way sober or not he would have been able to drive the vehicle. Guy got off. Personally I think if the driveshaft on his mouth had been "decoupled" as well he wouldn't have been charged. However, back to regular programming simple fact of the matter is that sometimes people do make poor judgements at one point in their lives. Doesn't necessarily mean they'll be a bad tandem instructor years later. -Michael