Gregg (
Wakulla Diving Center) and I had been kicking around the idea of changing the Meg Setup specifically for cave diving for several years now, even before Cedric bolted two 80s to his plenum. Staying at the dive shop for several weeks I finally decided to go ahead with the idea. Gregg provided all the hose lenghts and other parts we needed, and his shop is ideal for any kind of custom conversion and augmentation.
What had bugged us was that you always have to carry extra bailout, which you end up lugging around with you all the time anyhow, increassing dragg and profile. We would always carry extra 80s e.g. scootering to the end of the JB line, drop all but one and go exploring. The basic idea now was to change the diluent for a much larger tank to serve also as an initial bailout. This would be sufficient to return to the stages. The larger tank should be of the size of the plenum. The whole setup was to be configured like doubles.
What we ended up with is a very compact setup of the width of the original Meg, but with tons of bailout. As there is no stage to hand off it obviously requires a long hose. Reaching the valve on the diluent/bailout is like reaching the valve on a set of doubles.
The first two pictures show the empty plenum and the tank assembled as a set of doubles. The plenun is slightly rotated, and the then backwards facing clip is removed as it would break scraping the ceiling. The clip in the middle just clears the tank and wing seen in the third pic.
Pictures four and five indicate the mounting angle of the Tiger Mounts - slightly forward to reduce profile. The extra tiger mount on the bailout allows attaching an argon/suit inflation tank.
Picture six shows the off-set of the breathing hoses. As the Meg head has the breathing hose ports offset anyway, this setup merely reverses the offset to the other side. Longer breathing hoses are not needed.
Pic Seven shows the Meg ready to go.
Obviously the setup is not quite finished yet and needs some revision on details. An integrated BOV is the next logical step. An obvious concern is the reduction in redundancy by combining diluent and bailout. A drawback is to have to haul the whole rigg to the filling station to top off the diluent. We will play with a smaller oxygen tank and de-invert it to see how that performs. Currently, the whole setup dives no different than the Meg alone minus the bailuout stage, and squeezing through some tight spots is no more of an issue.
Joerg