billbooth

Ok, that's what I was wondering. Thank you. So I guess those rigs will be hard to use in a 182 if you're sitting in the "student" position. The magnets we use aren't all that strong. You need a tall tandem master trying to get near the compass to swing the needle. Anyway, once the pilot sets his gyro compass, it is a non-issue. Besides, GPS is not affected, and that's all most of us use nowadays.

In a perfect world, I would like to "test" all new products for years before pronouncing them "ready" for market. However, everyone who tries these riser covers wants them...NOW. So, we have decided to release them with the caveat: "While magnetic riser covers have no obvious flaws, God knows what the next few years will show us about them."

As I said, we have "rubbed" these riser covers all over video cameras with no degradation to video images in the cameras.

Our magnetic risers covers have been tested with Cypres and Vigil, Pro-Tracs, digital cameras, and even pacemakers. So far, no damage. You should, however, keep them at least 6'' away from the aircraft compass.

I've been playing with magnetic riser covers for quite a while now. In the current version we are now offering, they seem to answer all the complaints I've heard about riser covers for years now. 1. They hold with the same force, no matter how much "riser stuff" you put under them, and no matter how high or low your rig sits on your back, yet seem incapable of "locking up" the way tuck tabs sometimes do under light loads. 2. They don't wear out, or tear up webbing like Velcro does. 3. No test jumper has had one come open yet. 4. They very often actually re-close themselves after opening. 5. Through the amazing healing properties of magnets, they actually cure shoulder and neck injuries caused by hard opening shocks. (I don't really believe #5...but some people probably will.)

We have tested them at over 250 mph.

Thanks guys. Some of these names are great, I should have done this months ago.

All right...Give me a better one. You've got one week.

I am looking for Bob Christ, or anyone who was on my 1994 North Pole Expedition. I cannot find my copy of the video. HELP!

We now use a 4 ring system for our military bundle systems with all up loads of over 850 lbs. A properly constructed 3 ring, starting with an RW 10, is more than enough for tandem jumps up to 500 lbs. I have made a 5 ring release for a 10,000 balloon gondola, and several other "secret" applications.

You will notice that from day one, Vector/Sigma tandem bags have four locking stows. The center two are very close together, yielding a "balanced" force on each side of the stow band. This has kept the canopy in the bag until line stretch pretty effectively for the past 23 years.

I, also, cannot be sure from the photos how the rig was constructed. However, I suspect some sort of substandard material or construction method. I have never seen this kind of damage...even on inverted drop tower tests to destruction.

In a lot of ways, Velcro is superior to tuck tabs. Most of our military customers have realized this, and order Velcro exclusively. The grass always seems greener....until you actually get to the other side of the fence, and see that there is crab grass over there too.

If the reserve is packed well and the rig is sized right the riser covers almost never come open. I almost never have a problem with mine. (Maybe 1 in 500 walks to the plane result in open riser covers) I want a new vector, I guess I will wait to even think about it till I hear about whats new. If everyone waited to purchase, on every rumor of a "new-and-improved" Vector, Relative Workshop would not get any orders, and go out of business...Therefore, no "new-and-improved" rig would ever make it to market. Buy now, so that we may continue to afford the research and testing required to bring any new product to market. Three quarters of the new ideas I come up with don't work out anyway, and are therefore never marketed. So there is no telling when anything really new will appear on my gear.

Thanks for the tip.

They know the gear, but in Bill Booth's experience, he only has around 500 some tandems. I know there are guys out there with 5000+ tandems. They may not have the grasp of the gear that Booth has, but I bet they have a bit more working knowledge in the discipline of tandem jumping. I have a little over 1,000 tandems, but there are guys out there with over 10,000. Some people can simply take more abuse than others.

My plan is to license it to anybody who wants it.

I am planning to license the Skyhook, for use in sport container systems only, in February 2007, after talking with interested manufacturers at the PIA Symposium. The Skyhook now has several years of "perfect" function, so I think it is time to let it out into the general market. Over 90% of the rigs from Relative Workshop now go out the door with Skyhooks.

The Skyhook is placed closer to the pilot chute than the bag on the reserve bridle, so that the pilot chute is ALWAYS ABOVE the bag. This is a fundamental design requirement of any such system.

If I ever did make the "perfect rig". There would be nothing to do next year, and I would probably die of boredom...after going out of business because of no new orders, that is.

With your main container (and riser covers) closed, it can easily take over 15 lbs. of pull to remove your reserve bag from the container. It takes a pilot chute of about 13" finished diameter to do that. Pockets on the bridle won't generate nearly that much drag. But the most important thing to consider, is that the second pilot chute can't "tell" the difference between a reserve horse shoe (which is very rare) and a reserve pilot chute hesitation (which is very common). Ask yourself this simple question: "Do you really want your reserve bag pulled out of the container by the secondary pilot chute while your main pilot chute is hesitating right above?" Sounds like a recipe for an entanglement between the heavy, spring loaded primary pilot chute, and your reserve lines to me.

As "freeflying" evolved, it became obvious to me that harness and container systems had to change to accommodate it. That is why we designed the Vector III, as the first freefly friendly rig. Secondary riser covers, pocketed corners for main bridle protection, tuck-up main pin protector flaps, and tuck-under reserve pin protector flaps, all made their debut on the Vector III. While the Vector II was a great rig for what it was designed to do, if you want to do the latest and greatest stuff in the air, you really need the latest and greatest gear on your back.

Actually, the original Wonderhog reserve container was the first new reserve container designed exclusively as a "back mounted" reserve container, and was the only reserve container of the time which had never been used as a "front mounted" reserve. Nonetheless, the FAA (in their infinite wisdom) did actually state, for a while, that you could pack it with either a back or front reserve rating. This aberration has long since past however, and a back rating is now required.

While I have not viewed any where near the number of high speed videos as you have, the ones I have watched lead me to agree with you completely. I have never seen one nor have I talked with anyone who has seen one. Urban myth comes to mind. Could you define what you mean by “line dump”? I don’t think everyone is on the same page with the use of this term. Line dump occurs when lines come out of rubber bands out of sequence, either by inertia or broken rubber bands, or, in other words, before they are pulled out of the stows in the normal fashion by the departing bag. Line dump is usually only serious when it is the locking stows that fail, allowing the canopy out of the bag before all the lines are unstowed. This is the classic definition of an "out-of-sequence" opening...which is what the bag was supposed to prevent in the first place. Any other stows "dumping" before they should, should NOT produce a hard opening, although this could, on rare occasion, produce a bag lock. This is why you have to "match up" your pilot chute size, suspension line thickness, choice of rubber band (tube stow), and your average deployment velocity, if you want to have consistent openings.

Back in December 1994, I helped Rigging Innovations with TSO C23D drop testing of Flexon, etc. containers. We loaded rubber dummies with lead until they weighed 340 pounds - or more - and dropped them from a B-25 bomber flying at 205 knots. None of those dummies dumped lines or canopies. ____________________________________________________________________________ I have also watched many, many, many high speed, sport parachute system test videos of "freebag" deployments, and have also yet to see a "bag strip". That puts them in the "hypothetical malfunction" category, at normal skydiving speeds, as far as I'm concerned. However, for our very high speed/high altitude military systems we have been using a freebag with a lot more than two locking stows, for many years now. Because above 250 mph, the wind can blow a canopy right out of a bag, without without even releasing "normal" locking stows. What I have seen is line dump on rubber banded main bags. I have also investigated very hard main openings and broken main canopies, and very often, the locking stow rubber bands are broken. We continue to use the original Para-Flite freebag system simply because of it's simplicity, and the fact that it has been so thoroughly tested for so many years. All that said, I see nothing wrong with "speedbags". As I said, we have been using something similar (no rubber bands, however) for years.