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rebreather hose maintenance
It was one of the last warm day´s in the late fall last year( 2001).
We are going to belgium to make a dive weekend in one of our favourite quarry spot: les carriere de vodelee.
We arrived in the afternoon and prepared our rebreathers for the first dive. Everything was running fine and we all do well our predive checks. Then we go into the water, two dive teams, each with one oc and rb diver. My team will explore first the old elevator down to the quarry, the other dive team, also one rb and oc diver, will do first some skills on the big marble platform. After that we want change the buddys and intend to finish the dive in our normal dive team order, two rb´s and two oc divers. On the 3m stopp we make a short bubble check and everything is fine, we descend to the old elevator. I heared some unusual noise, like the noise from the overpressure valve, no there is nothing. The bubble check on 3m was ok. There was the same noise again, ahh my oc buddy make this noise. No, there is the noise again, but everything is pretty ok with my machine.The little noise is comming and going. Hmm? So I think it´s only my oc buddy, who make this unusual noise and I forgot it for the rest of the dive. After 20min we meet the other team on the big marble platform. They doing still there skill´s. If we are comming closer to the team I´m wondering about the two very big eyes from my rb dive buddy. He is immediately comming over to me and show´s me that there is a leak in my system. So I switch directly to my bailout system and stopp the dive.
After ascend to surface and back on ground we make an analysis what happend with the machine. The scrubber was pretty dry, and there was no water in the canister or the other´s water trap´s of the system. What happends with the machine?
 I assemble the machine again and make every predive check again. Everything was working in the normal way.
But then I saw some small bubbles on the wet breathing hose, we find the leakage at once. There was a small cut in the inhale hose near the fitting to the OXY2. Under the big nut and cordura saftey protector, not really easy to find. And great surprise, not to find with my normal positive or negative leak pressure test!
Now we know what happend. I hear the small leakage, stupid thinking the noise where comming from my oc buddy, my buddy was not expierenced enough to see the small leakage under the cordura horse protectors.
rb hose maintenance. We don´t have a spare hose with us. So now we have to repair the hose with nothing. There was no possibility to glue the hose on this place. So first I cut the hose straight over the demage.
 Then we pull the hose over the OXY2 fitting and fix this with 2 cable tie´s.
These draeger hoses are very strong, so we need some minutes and four hands to pull the hose over the connecting from the OXY2.
Perfect, it works.
Hopefully the machine is now ok.
Only two cable tie´s, is this ok?
We make 3 more dive´s on this weekend and it was ok.
Next week I will order a new breathing hose and some hundred cable tie´s :-)
Ekki Schepanski
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