Basejumper.com - archive

At Bridge Day 2012 I jumped my ACE260 (no ZP, lots of jumps) that I had packed before leaving BD 2011. I know for a fact that the slider was up. When it opened I was rocked so hard that I saw stars and my vision faded. My helmet compressed to the point that it caused my glasses to cut my nose.

I jumped it 2 more times after that and it was normal.

Think it was just a freak occurrence or due to the amount of time it had been packed?

for me, historically the older the packjob has been the better or softer the openings. haven't jumped too many oldies, but a few.

I'd guess it was a freak occurrence.

I never leave rigs packed for that long, but I remember seeing a military study on reserves where they found basically no difference in opening characteristics after about 30 days. You might dig around on the rigging forum on DZ.com if you want to find it--I think it was in a discussion on repack cycles.

I've sort of had the same experience in reverse. Back when I was young and bulletproof I used to freefall some reasonably low stuff, and I found that having a brand new pack job made the openings ever so slightly faster.

I'd say it was the packjob. I've jumped plenty of old packjobs and there was nothing significant about the openings. My most recent oldie was in China and that was a trash pack that was 15 months old.

Never even pulled the PC out to re-pack that either,....for all you guys who insist you have to pack your PC just before you jump

And I believe that they were testing pack jobs that were up to 5 years old.

Do you use a slider stow?

Indirect control. Primary stow only. The rubber band seemed fine and not stretched out on successive jumps.

Edit:
Nevermind. I misread that. There is no slider stow loop on my risers or anything on the slider. Just a plain small mesh slider.

I had a pretty similar opening on a fresh pack job slider up. 5-6 second delay, tracking suit, cliff. It could be attributed to head down position and not quartering or tying the slider enough.

A few things may have happened to you. Your slider may have come off the grommets a bit if it was shifted around (not that likely). What was your body position? Even slider up delays super head low will have a tendency to swing you like a rodeo bull.

Body position was no different than any other slider up jump I've done in the past few months... I usually quarter the slider pretty carefully because I do it so infrequently. I honestly don't remember what I did to the nose, though.

My packjob i recently jumped was a year old hahaha

in china like lonnies haha and it opened great but my exit was unstable as fuck hahahahaha

i had the left leg wobbles i like that feeling hahaha

I meant do you stow the slider to your C line once you pull it up into your pack job. Doing so will go a long way to prevent hard openings. You would be surprised by how a little movement here can cause drastically hard openings. I would almost go as far as to say that the majority of hard S/U openings are caused by the slider moving off the slider stops prematurely, most likely while packing.