Healthways double hose

[SeaRat]

Jim,

You've got to tell us more about that. I've seen it, and apparently the DivAir has no exhaust valve, just that big hole in the center of the case. It appears to work pretty well. I'm especially interested in whether you got any water up into the exhaust hose with that regulator. You've got to write more about that reg, please...

John

[swimjim]

When I dove my DivAir, I used it with a straight mouth piece and one way valves installed. I do not know if that was the OEM way. No duckbill was used in the body. Bear in mind that this was a limited test in 6 - 8 fow. Nothing fancy here. Just finding out the basics. The exhaust hose stayed as clear as any other double hose reg. I had thought that the exhalation effort may be higher as the exhaust had kind of a bottle neck in the housing. Such was not the case. I found both inhalation and exhalation to be most satisfactory. I would rate this reg on par with a Healthways Blue label scuba deluxe equipt with a USD hose set as far as use is concerned. As I made the diaphragm and I know it's possible issues I would not test it deeper without some back up, whether it be a pony or another diver with an octo. The reg itself I think is pretty solid. With a well made repro diaphragm I'd be a little braver. LOL. One of these days I'll mount up the STA to my back plate and do a deeper dive with a pony. Perhaps I could drop on the local shipwreck in 50 fow then. I'd love to really run the thing through it's paces.

Jim

[SeaRat]

I had my Healthways Scuba Deluxe in the water again today. But this one is special, as I have modified it to the third generation Healthways Scuba, the equivalent of a Gold Label, by incorporating the chrome case (#6A) of a Gold Label Healthways Scuba and the associated valve body assembly (16A). I have a composite, as the cover assembly is the satin variety from the second generation (with a slight modification--I glued a nut onto the case to keep the diaphragm from completely covering, and blocking the exhalation valve). But it has the innards of the third generation, and its breathing characteristics. I completed this regulator with a USD hose/mouthpiece (straight), with the non-return valves in place. Today, I dove the regulator mounted on my twin 45s, without a second regulator (forgot my Calypso, so just did without it). I had my other Healthways Gold Label Scuba regulator along just in case there was blowby which caused problems, but did not need to use it.

The Dive[/U]
I dove at High Rocks on the Clackamas River, using my normal (and really funky, glued-together for expansion) wet suit (full, with hood, boots and gloves). I got into my Para-Sea BC, then into the twin-tank setup with a USD backpack, and put on my weight belt. Many people don't know what that lip on the USD backpack is for, and it is to hold the weight belt so that it is on the backpack and not the waist of the diver. This makes it an integral part of the scuba, and not simply on the diver's waist; it also relieves some strain from the diver's back while underwater and walking on land.

The water was really clear for today's dive as the river has not seen rain is over a week. But it was cold also. I had my old dive watch on my left wrist, and an old Voit depth gauge on my right wrist. I decided to use a new (to me--off E-Bay) Dacor tri-view mask, and I put a +2 diopter reading lens into it from my other Dacor mask. I really like the fit of these old masks from Dacor. But as I was putting on my fins, my mask dipped into the water (it was on a strap on my Para-Sea BC), and I lost the diopter. I completed putting on my gear, and commensed a search for the diopter lens. It was an impossible search, as the current took it away, and it is nearly invisible. I was also test-breathing the regulator to ensure that there were no problems, and found none. So I gave up, and pushed off into the deeper water.

I was in the upper pool, and there are two currents, one along the shore, and one coming from the island. I swam to deeper water across the current, and noted that the sponge on the rocks was still green, but starting its fall deterioration. In deeper water, the current was not as strong, and I swam across to the far shore. There is a tree there that has been on the bottom for a long time. Last summer, there was a bass that hung out there, but it was gone. I swam upstream, under the main current and then let myself go with the current. Because the visibility was 15 feet, really good for the river, I was able to see the surface and the current coming in from the other side of the island, above me. The current on the bottom was downstream, and the current on the surface was cross-stream at this point (it hit the rocks, and joined the down stream current just behind me). In the layer between the two currents were about twenty Chinook salmon smolt. I hung on the bottom, turned on my side looking toward the surface, and they came to me to investigate. I'm the first diver they have ever seen, so there was no fear even of my bubbles (which, wih the Healthways Scuba, were behind me too). Several come right up to my face, and I could see the vertical lines which identified them as Chinook. One fish paused to sample some material in the water for edibility, then returned to looking me over. After about five minutes of watching these fish look for food in the current, I turned over toward the bottom, and finned off downstream.

I knew that I was close to the far bank, and that the cliffs of High Rocks (where kids like to jump into the water in the summer when it's warm), and knew that there was a vehicle in the bottom. I found it, and found that the currents had scoured the bottom a bit further away from the vehicle, which last dive had been almost completely buried by the rocks and bottom derbies. I saw mostly the front of the vehicle, which is an SUV from what I can tell. As I watched from a weightless hover, a small resident sculpin, perhaps the one I had photographed this summer, made its way out of the hiding places amongst the rocks inside the engine compartment. The vehicle was barely recognizable as a vehicle, as there was no glass, no dashboard, no steering wheel, no hood, lights or doors. Only the frame was still intact, and now a bit more visible than last summer. In front, I saw where the license should be on the upper part of the bumper, but there was no license plate. It was gone. Twisted pieces of metal were around the vehicle, but the outline of the passenger compartment was there from about mid-door frame down. The rest was gone. The sculpin swam out to investigate me, then scurried under the dashboard area.

This is perhaps that same sculpin that I photographed last summer, balanced on metal skin from the vehicle. Photo Copyright 2009, John C. Ratliff


Here the sculpin has found harbor inside the near the motor and battery compartment. Photo Copyright 2009, John C. Ratliff

As I was examining the vehicle, I started looking for the VIN plate. It wasn't where the windshield had been, so I looked down the door frame. Then, I found it, just above what is now the bottom. The vehicle is not level in the bottom, but has its front end up on rocks, and the back end submerged under the bottom. It has been there at least two years (I found it summer before last). And now, at last, I had found the VIN plate (Vehicle Identification Number plate). But I did not have my +2 diopter reading lens in the mask, and in the dim light could not make out the numbers. I thought for a minute, then reached down to my leg and pulled out my sheath knife. It is a Wenoka Sea Style knife I particularly like with a button depressor to hold it into the sheath, so I can get it out with one hand, and put it back in with one single motion. It has a five to six inch blade, and with just a little prying the VIN plate came right off. I now had the secret to the vehicle's identity in my hand. I put it into my Para-Sea's central pocket, made sure that the velcro flap was secure, and replaced my knife. The sculpin had decided to disappear, so I started downstream again.

The current was not swift, and I was at almost thirty feet by the Voit depth gauge (which was reading shallow as I was in fresh water). Since I was fairly deep the wet suit had compressed, and I was heavy. I took my mouthpiece out and blew a breath into my BC (manual inflation uses spent air, whereas auto inflation uses breathing air). I was again weightless, and as I drifted downstream, I passed a peculiar piece of wood, which would be nice for my garden. I was a strangely-shaped piece of pitchwood from a Douglas fir tree, with ridges and grain that would make a great addition to the yard. I grabbed it, and continued downstream. As the bottom became shallower, I got more buoyant, and let air out of the Para-Sea BC, almost attaining neutral again. But because of the tank's becoming lighter, I was now still a bit buoyant, and so grabbed a rock for ballast. That made my buoyancy right again.

I was not sure where I was in the river, so I released the rock and briefly surfaced to see whether I had passed under the footbridge over the river (a converted railroad bridge now used for walkers and bicyclists). It was just in front of me. I surface dived to the bottom at about ten feet, and continued downstream, finding a fishing lure as I went. I picked it up, but did not want to put it into the BC pocket, and so just held it. Continuing down, I came to my exit point, surfaced and saw that I wanted to go just a bit further downstream. I ducked down, swam another fifty feet downstream, found a good rock crevice to climb out onto the shore, and surfaced. Somewhere I had lost the lure, but that was okay. I placed a but of weight on the wood, and it cracked on one end, so I picked it up and put it onto the shore. I then worked my fins off one by one (still underwater with my regulator in my mouth), and walked back to shallow water. My Para-Sea BC has a special strap for my fins, and I unhooked it, placed my fins into the strap, and tried to hook it up again. This strap also holds the key to my car. But I had shortened it too far, and it needed to be pulled out a bit. I pulled it out of the plastic retainer, and had to put it back in; finally I had my fins secure on the strap. I crawled out of the water, as the rocks were really slippery, and when I was on land, finally stood up, assuming the bipedal mode of locomotion so unique to our species.

The final workout of the dive was to ascend back up the sloke about a hundred feet to the road and walk back to the car. This makes a good hour workout, and I was able to see the fish, got the VIN plate, and enjoy a nice sunny Oregon autumn morning. I had left the house about 9:00 AM, and returned to my wife and lunch at noon--pretty good for a morning dive workout.

Later, I contacted the Clackamas County Sheriff's Department via their website reporting system to tell them about the vehicle and it's VIN number. I have yet to hear a reply, but will tell everyone when I found out; I'm really interested in the history of that vehicle, and how it came to be in the river.

The Healthways Scuba (third generation) performed wonderfully. It is a very nice-breathing regulator, and I had not one problem at all with it. I would heartily recommend it to our vintage scuba community, and see that there is another one on ebay right now if anyone is interested.

John

[Dale]

Great dive report, John. One of these days I'll get back to Oregon & hopefully get a chance to dive with you. Glad to hear the Healthways worked so well. I think its just you & me diving them:)

[SeaRat]

Dale,

We may be the only ones diving these Healthways Scuba regulators, but I know of at least one other person who will be doing it soon.

I dove the same spot yesterday, this time with more modern gear. I used my AIR I Scubapro regulator, and was sorry I did. The AIR I has the lowest breathing resistance of just about any regulator, but has one nagging problem, it leaks a bit of water around its huge exhaust (the whole inhalation diaphragm is the exhaust, held on only at the bottom).

Anyway I was looking for any other identifier for that submerged car, as the vehicle plate I took off that car in the dive above was not a VIN plate, but some other ID. I spent 20 minutes combing the wreckage, and could find nothing. But at one point I looked on the frame at the driver's door area, and I had to get into a head-down attitude slightly on my side to see it. I had a helmet light yesterday, and tried to focus on what I thought may be an identifier, and as I did, I would get quite a bit of water from the regulator. At one point, I needed to swallow a bit of it--I didn't like that at all. I thought how it would have been much nicer to have dived my Healthways Scuba third generation regulator an that dive (I had two in the car, and had to decide between the regulators). So I guess I'm a confirmed vintage diver.

I swam downstream, and it kept getting darker underwater. I had begun the dive in nice sunshire, and figured I was under a foot bridge (converted rail to trail bridge). So I surfaced, and found myself in a deluge of rain, with streams of water pouring off the bridge and a six-inch splash zone on the water's surface. I ducked underwater to keep from getting "wet" in the rain

I had started the dive minus one of my gloves, and my left hand was starting to get cold, so I headed downstream a bit more, then exited in the rain. At least I was appropriately dressed. As I finally struggled out onto the walking path above the river some 50 feet or so (I had to get down on all fours toward the end as the rain had made the dirt path I normally take slippery, and I hung onto a root as I crawled up to the flat area above the river), a man walking his dog came over the see what I was doing. I told him that I had been diving, and started in the sunshine, then had to contend with this rain. He asked about my diving solo, and I told him that I had dived that way for many years, and when I was in the Air Force, had done parascuba jumps, which of course were by definition solo. He seemed satisfied.

Anyway, there will be no identifying of that vehicle. I tried, but it won't happen.

John

[swimjim]

I dive the Healthways from time to time. I'm just getting back into the water after back surgery and I'll be doing further testing on Divair diaphragms. Divair was the forerunner of Healthways and was a fine reg in it's own right. I've been testing Jerry Mosemans indented diaphragm and it has performed really great. I have one of his Pancake models and that is next on the slate. I will be diving that next weekend in a local inland lake.
I now own the Healthways Scuba, Scuba Deluxe and a really cherry Gold label. I haven't dove the Scuba, but I have dove the Deluxe and the Gold label a bunch of times and find them to be compareable to the US Divers StreamAir and Mistral respectively. It's a pity that parts simply are not available for the Healthways. Regrettably, the market is very small. They are good regs though.

Jim

[tomcatpc]

Why is it most of the time I do a random online search on Healthways SCUBA gear that it leads me to this site?  Found this topic and spent the last 20 minutes reading it...
Mark

[nikeajax]

Mark, yeah, I hear ya: the info here is usually positive and useful too! This is in contrast to, "I hate Healthways because..." then they start ticking off reasons on their fingers and toes.

Like when I was talking to Phil, who I'll paraphrase, "I'm really not interested in USD stuff, it's too common, but I love these more obscure pieces..." he was holding his Divair at the time.

I've said it before, it's the challenge of the hunt. A lot of us here, on this site don't want to tune our regs so they all work exactly the same, but instead, we want to enjoy the peculiarities each vintage reg has to offer.

JB

[SeaRat]

Actually, I'm interested in the engineering aspects of the Healthways gear. They were pioneers, and learning to understand how these regulators were put together helps to understand the history of our diving equipment. Healthways came into the game very early, and without Healthways, there would have been no Scubapro; there is a direct connection between the two. We had actual divers putting the Healthways gear together, same as Dacor. They understood the requirements of real divers, and looking at the old Healthways regulators (both double hose and single hose) helps us to understand how our current gear evolved.

I have an advantage over most other divers, as I started out in 1959 with Healthways, and they were my first two regulators; original Healthways SCUBA double hose regulator was my first, then a Healthways Scuba Star for my second. So I have a very long history with Healthways gear. Some of my fondest dives were with my Healthways SCUBA regulator. Over the Christmas holidays, I talked via phone with my youngest (of the four of us) brother, Ken. He mentioned the dive in Elk Lake when I was a kid, saying:

"John, I was in the rubber raft you dove out of."

"You mean our 7-man life raft?" I said.

"Yes," Ken said. "You were going down, and Grandma was there with Dad and us." All my brothers were on the raft too, along with my Mom. "Your bubbles would come up first on one side of the raft, then on another. Sometimes they were close, then they would go away. Grandma told us, 'Tell him to come up, tell him to come up!' But you stayed down."

"Well," I said, "I was having a great time, below you at about 35 feet deep, watching the trout swim through the underwater plants which looked like a forest. I looked up at you in the raft, and watched my bubbles headed for the surface. I swam around, not too far away from the raft too, but far enough to chase a few trout."

"Grandma was sure relieved when you finally came up," Ken said. She was kinda turning blue during my dive, from anxiety I guess. Grandmas tend to do that, I guess.

"Well, I had a small tank on, and was running low on air," I said. Actually, my first tank was a 38 cubic foot tank, as I was a young guy then. Then I said,

"Do you know what Dad told Grandma when she asked him to 'Tell him to come up'?"

"No," Ken said.

"Well, Dad turned to Grandma and said simply, 'How?'" I said.

"Wow, that is interesting to hear after all these years," Ken said. "We had some good times with that ol' life raft."

That was one of my first dives with the Healthways SCUBA, and my first White Stag wet suit. Before I had dived, but it was really cold in the North Santiam with David Hadeen. He had a wet suit, and I wore a sweat shirt over my swim suit. That was it, I must have stayed down about five minutes. The wet suit really helped my diving.

John

[nikeajax]

Jan 3, 2017 17:20:21 GMT -8 SeaRat said:

Actually, I'm interested in the engineering aspects of the Healthways gear. They were pioneers, and learning to understand how these regulators were put together helps to understand the history of our diving equipment. Healthways came into the game very early, and without Healthways, there would have been no Scubapro; there is a direct connection between the two. We had actual divers putting the Healthways gear together, same as Dacor. They understood the requirements of real divers, and looking at the old Healthways regulators (both double hose and single hose) helps us to understand how our current gear evolved.

John

Every year my wife and I have a New Years Day get together. One of our guests was asking me what I do for hobbies: I took him to my studio and showed him some of my gear. I didn't want to get too into mechanics, but I gave him a really quick lecture of how things work. I also mentioned that JYC held a lot of patents, and that was how he was able to live the life that he did. I showed him some of my HW gear, and explained to him that there were other companies besides USD/AL and that they had engineers who were totally innovative and worked around the patents that other companies held.

I really like working on different types of systems: it's fun to see how they are the same and how they are not. Innovation is what makes collecting fun

JB

[tomcatpc]

I wonder how many more antique Healthways topics I can find by accident and bring back to life?
Looking forward to me next Healthways Reg....
Mark

[vance]

I'm resurrecting this thread because I just went out to visit Creed and picked up some stuff he wanted out of his garage. While he couldn't find his balanced Scuba valve with the Conshelf crown block, etc., I think I know the answer to why he was able to get the parts to fit while others were not successful. As has been posted elsewhere on this forum, there are two HP valve bodies that were used on the Scuba "A" model; long and short. I believe that the long one will accept the USD parts, but the short one won't.

I'll be putting this to the test shortly, after I acquire a crown block, etc., and a Sportsways orifice. Creed used a USD orifice, but the Sportsways might fit in the HW valve w/o machining (and I know where one is).

One thing I wonder about is if the Deluxe and/or the GL came with different length valve bodies. The one Deluxe I have has a short body. I think it's likely the Deluxe series has both length bodies, but I doubt the GL series used different ones since its body was redesigned, but who knows? Maybe they soldered the venturi covers on whatever valves they had on hand. But with the new internal yoke system, it would have required two different yoke assemblies.

[nikeajax]

Phil, instead of using the SW seat, what about using the USD crown block and SW plunger, like out the kind out of your Hydrotwin? The SW seat sits up too high I think! The HT plunger should fit into the USD block, as they take the same size o-ring.

BTW, it was Creed's idea I ran with for the Snorkeljet, now that I recall: his was a very simple deflector, whereas mine really channels the air better...

JB

[vance]

Apr 22, 2018 8:11:12 GMT -8 nikeajax said:

Phil, instead of using the SW seat, what about using the USD crown block and SW plunger, like out the kind out of your Hydrotwin? The SW seat sits up too high I think! The HT plunger should fit into the USD block, as they take the same size o-ring.

BTW, it was Creed's idea I ran with for the Snorkeljet, now that I recall: his was a very simple deflector, whereas mine really channels the air better...

JB

The shaft diameters are the same on the SW plunger and the USD seat. Your idea might work, but the shaft length on the SW seat and figuring out a spring(s) might be an issue?

I don't really want to cut the SW seat, as they are rare and expensive, and the Conshelf part is readily available. Mike (Creed) used a USD Titan orifice that looks a lot like the SW orifice, but I have no way to compare them now. I'll have to look at both first.

I'm thinking it would be best to forget about the SW orifice, and keep the whole internal set USD parts as Mike did.

Time for a field trip to see Jim....

[nikeajax]

I have a SW plunger, I ain't using it neethur, so I ain't ascared ta cut it er nuthin'! I may try this on my Goldie, or C-model. It'll be very easy for me to put back to OEM too, and I don't have to worry about an actuating-pin mod if that becomes an issue for your spearmint (experiment)

JB