epoxy fiber glass shell

A ligth and well balanced shell en français

Before building this shell I was already diving an home made shell I had quickly made using the original shell as a mold....I offered denis to make an other one sligthly modified but he prefered to make a seriously designed new one .
Actually Denis feared to get a shell looking like my first home made you can see bellow (((-:

so we started working seriously, it took us 3 months of saturday afternoon work fo me and a good dozen of evenings for Denis.

Denis started building a wooden mold, I had determined the dimensions of the shell taking in account the errors of my previous home made shell. bettering the trim was my main concern along with the possibility for the rebreather to stand

We built this shell using epoxy resin and thin aviation rowing fiberglass, we used as little fiber layers as possible to get a ligth shell. Epoxy resin provides 30% more resistence for the same amount of resin then the polyester resin. We wanted a ligth shell to better the trim .

the shell beeing stratified

an other thing we needed was a shell able to stand unlike the orginal one .
also the tank had to be protected from the ground unlike the original dolphin shell.

So we designed a U shaped bottom shell .

When the tank is attached in the U shaped bottom of the shell the tank is protected, the “U” is ridgidified and the whole rebreather stands uprigth by itself easying storage and pre and post dive operations.
when the tank is removed a piece of wood replaces the tank to keep the shell rigid and standing.

We cut two stripes of metal we screwed at the top and the bottom of the shell , those stripes you can see bellow also added ridgidity to the shell and provided a tough zone to fix the wing and harness backplate to the shell.

We designed the shell deep enough to both contain the cannister and leave enough space to the main counter lung so that it can expand enough

We also left enough space in higth so that the canister can be installed easily without having to lay down the rebreather to install the canister entering the canister connexion first int the counter lung P-ports.
the canister is now easily installed in 10 seconds without even having to have a look inside the shell.

all of that seems to be details but believe me beeing able to prepare your rebreather standing uprigth on the flor make the diver life mutch easier

We are machining a new sensor holder that will be installed on the inspiration hose because the tecme one we use is likely to break soon or later if the breather fall down from a table .

Also the sensor holder has a small diameter entry compared with the original twin hoses ports (26 mm instead of 35)

Good hose entry made by denis to avoid hoses
to rub against the sharp fiber glass hole.