Scuba Tech Tips: Regulator Service, Adjust The IP - S07E20

[Music] hi guys Alec Pierce goodbye tech tips now this is another of our service your own regulator series and I want to I want to clarify that I am not advocating I'm not promoting I'm not even suggesting that uses service your own regulator but number one this is educational it'll teach you a little bit about how service something how the service you have your regulator is is is done in a dive star and for you guys that are really handy who know what you're doing maybe you've been servicing your own reg maybe you're in a dime store who knows maybe some of these ideas some of these tips will help so that's what it is is it just information education not a suggestion that you do it on your own so and the last one of these are one of the prior ones I showed you how to make an intermediate pressure gauge and an easy way to check your intermediate pressure now what I suggested at the time was that you had you take your BC inflator hose which is should be on every regulator or you can put one on for this specific purpose if you take your BC inflator hose and then you make up and it's immediate pressure gauge there's just a few dollars twenty-five dollars or less of materials then you can put that on to your BC inflator hose and you can see the intermediate pressure of your regulator okay so that's what I showed you last time now I need to show you how to adjust the intermediate pressure because you need me the pressure can be adjusted it needs to be adjusted and one of when our regulars completely rebuilt all new parts and everything for all that together and then it needs to be set so that proper ng mediate pressure is being fed to the second stage and there's a couple of different ways to do that and the different ways are related to different regulators so some regulators and just to have different means but before we go on to that let me show you something else I did in that last video show you this device which is a professional intermediate pressure gauge chequered that's a technical term professional intermediate gauge checker anyway whatever you want to call it but this is a device that most dive stores would have and it has its brass device with a quick release on it and it has means immediate pressure gauge on it it's just a little more sophisticated than when I showed you continued and I doesn't do anything more just a standard one of those cheap gauges mounting is a nice brass thing with the proper spigot to fit into your into your LP hose that does have on on this end it does have a lever which allows you to see what it can do it can get rid of the intermediate pressure entirely or it can what they call cycle the regulator this actually lets the low pressure drop come back up and you can do that many many times that's called cycling and what that does after a regular breaks been completely serviced it helps the new parts they get set just settled in they feel like it's sort of like break when you put new brakes on your car you shouldn't use them too hard for a while until the new shoes and pads you get broken in a little bit same type of thing well if you have my little cheap gauge my little $20.00 gauge instead of the 120 mile engaged you can do the same thing just by using the purge button on the regulator so you know you're not missing anything by not having that expensive gauge let's talk very quickly about adjusting us so now you have your regulator on a tank and you've looked at the pressure gauge and and and the intermediate pressure is a hundred and crush is 150 psi right on and now for this particular regulator the pressure is only supposed to be a hundred and forty psi however as I mentioned before it can be as much as fifteen percent plus or minus and that's that's quite a lot so 150 psi is just fine but if you did need to or want to adjust it how would you do that on most regulators you will find on the first stage you will find I'm normally on the end of the first stage you will find some type of adjustment I don't know if I can show you this one here Kevin just let me shut this off in it but I think I can we're going to turn this towards Kevin so on this particular regulator this is not uncommon you can see right there there's a slot on the end and if you have a large screwdriver that fits in there make sure it fits in properly so that you don't scratch the material and not like this one there we go and that turns this here it turns back and forth that is the intermediate pressure adjustment technically actually what it's doing is actually pushing on the spring and the spring in this particular case is pushing on the diaphragm and then the diaphragm pushes on the needle on the seat and and changes ant immediate pressure some other regulars are a little bit different but let's just see how that works so here's your regulator and I strip this down so we just have the first stage and the second stage and then we have my my quick and easy and cheap pressure gauge intermediate pressure gauge on here and now we're gonna turn it on let's see what happens okay so let's get it on here okay there we are at 150 now it's really quite simple if you take a screwdriver in this particular case they're not all flat screwdrivers and you turn that thread in you're increasing the pressure on the spring and that's pushing down on the seat see the pressure claiming no other pressure is up to - is up to about 190 and you should be able to hear something now - that's right that's starting the free flow which is exactly right it's the intermediate pressure claims too high the second stage will begin to free flow it will let off that excess pressure once you're good that's what you want you don't want the the air to be cut off to the diver that's the first stage isn't pretty so now we'll back it down a little bit back a down the road there there free flowing a stop and it works the other way as well have to keep removing the pressure but let's take this out a little ways so now it's back to almost 150 we'll keep going out a little further now it's down to 145 and you can keep on going to go don't go too far because eventually that thread is screw will pop out and it's not under a great deal of pressure it's not too serious but just be careful now the pressure you can see is down to under 125 psi so it's really just as simple with this particular style you just turn that thread until you get the the appropriate intermediate pressure and inappropriate meaning that the proper ng media pressure for every make and model of regulator is set by the factory and that number is determined by many many things the performance of the regulator the components in the regulator and and the second stage design and so on it'll vary sometimes quite a bit he didn't meet it pressure could be anywhere from 120 to 160 may be more or less than that depending on certain models I'm not familiar with but typically it's around 135 to 150 okay now that's on that particular regulator other raters a little bit different here's a very common regulator brand that everybody knows and it fits on as well but if you look on top and bottom there's no but there are a couple of allen keys and this particular an allen keys are allen sockets this particular one at this end if you put the appropriate size looks like quarter inch allen key into here you can turn that back and forth so it acts exactly the same as the one we just did you turn that nut and it adjusts the pressure on the spring which persons on the diaphragm and raises or lowers you ain't immediate pressure so this is another style there's only real difference is that instead of a screwdriver you're using an allen key to do that now I want to point out that there are some regulators and here's an example you can look at this regulator all day long and you won't find any kind of adjustment you see there is no adjustment there's a period to be a cap with some holes and if you look through those holes you can actually see Springs but there's no adjustment on this there's no screw there's no way to adjust this you can't grab it with a pair of pliers and that wouldn't be a very smart thing to do because this regulator is different from these other two this is a piston regulator and we've talked about this before Justin regulars vs. vs. diaphragm Regulus is the piston regulator it can't be adjusted that's right can't be adjusted very very few piston regular are a couple over the years that did have a means to be adjusted externally but very very few piston regulators are have adjustment for ant immediate pressure so how was the intermediate pressure set well it is set by virtue of the design of the components you catch that it's it's set by the design of the components so if you take this regular completely apart all two parts there are only our two moving parts in there the spring and the piston itself and you replace all the old rings and clean it perfectly and reassemble the property and put this cap back on snugly the way it's supposed to be and turn on the air pressure it'll be 150 or whatever the media media media intermediate pressure is supposed to be it'll be right on just design that way with that cap and those threads and that piston it'll be what it's supposed to be now very rarely but occasionally a piston regulator will show some variance and if it is necessary in order to make that regular work properly for the intermediate pressure to be adjusted to be to vary a little bit to bring it back into specs and it can't be done but not externally what the servicemen will do is he'll take it apart a game and you put in shims years ago they used to be metal shims stainless steel washers if you're like now they're made of Teflon or some other polycarbonate material that doesn't deteriorate and you put in very thin shims maybe just one maybe two maybe two or three shims so that the pressure is increased on the spring so instead of screwing it in it takes it apart puts the shim in puts it back together that will increase the pressure on the spring and increase the intermediate pressure that's how that's done with that piston regulator in most cases for shims if it's very very bad if it's a way off then you simply replace the spring the spring must be out of adjustment so there you go there's some ideas and how you adjust your intermediate pressure now before I let that go let me give you a bit of a warning here's not uncommon practice for divers to play with their intermediate pressure there's a mistaken belief I'm gonna say that again there's a mistaken belief that the higher the intermediate pressure the easier breathing your regulator would be not the case it is not the case whatsoever the age immediate pressure is determined by the manufacturer at the time of manufacture in the design of the regulator and intermediate pressure is the result of many many different components you need to realize that there are Springs in the second stage and levers and lever height seats and so on and if the intermediate pressure is not within factory specs then the breathing will not be correct increasing the intermediate pressure it may seem to make the breathing effort drop you saw with this particular one as I increase the pressure began to free flow haha that's easy not necessarily so no don't be misled into thinking that if you increase intermediate pressure your regular will be easier to breathe you set the intermediate pressure and then once it is set then you adjust the second stage to match that intermediate pressure and that's where they're breathing effort is determined the breathing effort is determined here not here and one more there's another mistaken belief there's a mistaken belief that if you decrease the intermediate pressure make it lower than what the factory specifications dictate that it makes a regular less likely to freeze up in cold water now you caught that mistaken belief because that's a mistaken belief as well although that is a fairly common there's a little group not a group of divers but there's a little faction of scuba divers who do a lot of cold water diving who are under the impression that decreasing the intermediate pressure will lessen the likelihood of their regulator freezing sorry wrong in fact decreasing intermediate pressure will actually slightly slightly perhaps increase select the hood of a freeze up I can explain that to you in technical terms some time and perhaps I'll do that but please if you are going to do anything with your intermediate pressure make sure that when you're finished it is that within factory specs there's some variance there but it should be at factory increasing or decreasing either is not correct and crank can lead to problems Smalling okay that's it how do I adjust your intermediate pressure we're going to go on in this series I'm going to show you the next step in this process and that is how to adjust the set staged to match the ante media pressure we'll talk more about that a little later Alec peer scuba tech tips see you soon

Channel: Alec Peirce Scuba

Views: 8,757

Rating: 4.9663863 out of 5

Keywords: alec, peirce, scuba, tech, tips, tip, underwater, diving, vintage, sea, hunt, remembered, skin, dive, salt, water, fresh, local, shop, scuba 2000, At The Ranch

Id: mLHYBN7Z324

Length: 13min 34sec (814 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 31 2018