Basejumper.com - archive

As I was unable to sleep I was wondering about bridals and why they are made from 1" flat webbing and not just standard cord? My thoughts are that since bridals are flat they haves more surface area which would tend to catch air and cause the pilot chute and canopy to lean a certain way during opening sequence. 550 cord would be more streamline and might help with more of a consistent opening.....?

Go ahead laugh, etc....... Just a thought. Bring on the verbal abuse. ;-/

Wide(flat) material is less prone to knotting up
Type IV has higher breaking strength
Attaching the pins to the 550 cords may prove to be awkward

I am betting the surface area drag is absolutely minimal, not to mention that the bridle can only be loaded when taught, and at that point its flat side is presented sideways, and the load will be inline with center of inflating canopy and inflated PC - basically, i think winning the lottery has more potential than having the bridle induced malfunction due to sideloading.

Finger trapping one on should be easy enough......but you would probably be correct on the Knot City with Cord!

Thanks for the Input!

Tie a knot in the cord X amount of inches above the canopy .Then thread the cord thru both pins.
Doesn't Vertex do something like that?(but with flat webbing?)

Check out the bridle on a PD Lightning CRW canopy. If you cannot find it on the web, let me know and I will post pics and a description.

Walt

I remember reading or hearing somewhere that the bridle being flat webbing and having more drag can be a good thing in the case of PC malfunctions - if the PC is pitched with enough altitude, even if it doesn't inflate the bridle has enough drag to pull the pins and deploy the canopy within a couple of seconds.

I think the story you heard was about
thick white bridals on reserve canopies.

Look at the posting of wingsuiters on
FB with their GoPro looking rearward,
tons of bridal exposed but it almost
never opens the container for them.

I think an uniflated pc has still much more drag then a bridle, I doubt that a bridle has enough drag to pull a pin... at least not with the pin tension I am comortable jumping with...

Aah yes, it probably was reserve bridles the conversation was about.

It was a reserve bridle, and they found that the bridle sometimes had enough drag, and sometimes not.

All the tests were done skydiving at terminal. It was a pull out system with a 13 or so foot bridle and a freebag. The test jumper would pull the handle opening the container and just hold it causing a planned horseshoe. The bag would often stay in the container until the second flier grabbed it and hucked it. The other option was to let go for a normal freebag deployment ... and then chase it down.

If it did lift it off the back, it was very slow. Once the bag hit the wind, it lifted quickly.

Ps, Bridal material is a girl you want to marry.

BR did have a bridle with a floating pin on their Vertex for a bit, but it never really got popular. That was a SINGLE floating pin, while the other one was fixed.

Some CRW bridles that Walt mentions are in fact dacron with a floating single curved pin, but you have to remember that in BASE you may go from terminal all the way to a very slow airspeed delay, and all that without the warm feeling of having the ability to cutaway and go for your reserve.

. +5

Just 'cause she does it before the ring, doesn't make her bridal material. Course, my mileage varied; better than most at that.

As Walt points out, the dacron bridle with a floating pin is common in CRW (in my limited experience it seems pretty universal) but this seems more to do with the 3-ring retractable pilotchute system than with any drag that may be induced by a webbing bridle
re the comments above on bridle-induced deployment of a reserve - I can't remember which one off the top of my head but one of the older makes of reserve out there actually has a series of little air-catching pockets sewn onto the bridle - an interesting plan c!

i tell you what i'd never jump that setup (two pins, one knot)

that knot has to travel a loooooong way before it says "hello" to the second pin...

i have sky jumped a single pin with string and a knot. that didn't scare me more than normal.

I'm pretty sure the bottom pin would POP first as it tried to bunch up.

I am pretty sure i can survivde a 150ft freefall - doesnt mean i will do it.

Oh I hear ya. It doesn't mean I'm going to make my bridle out of para cord either...

I'm just sayin' it could be done.

What is para cord? I am a rigger but dont know this type cord.
How low do you or any one want to go? I have the technology. Conditions are line length plus leg length plus risers/torso. and we add a foot for safety factor.
Game on?
Take care,
space.

Lets see the pictures. I couldn't really find anything good to look at....

Para cord is what everyone is making survival gear with, bracelets, belts, handles on their survival knives, etc etc etc....

I have made a 4ft bridle with para cord used on a S/L on a Velcro rig, but nothing with a pin rig.

I suppose it's about time that I post something of substance, so here goes.

Keep in mind this is a skydiving canopy (don't start hating, just sayin') but it is a CRW-specific canopy. CRW dogs and BASE jumpers need the same opening characteristics, i.e., on-heading and fast but smooth.

In the first pic (Lightning_bridle_on_canopy.jpg), you see the bridle as it is properly installed on a Lightning (this one is missing the closing pin, though). The blue cell is the center cell.

The leftmost arrow shows the attachment point. Seems very odd to me that it is not attached to the center, but this is the factory installation and it works fine.

The arrow on the right points to a stop for the pin. It's pretty easy to see that when the canopy is packed (and many Lightnings use tailpockets and are free-packed in the container), that pin stop maintains a minimum required distance for the pin to stay away from the rings and still have enough free bridle to reach the closing loop.

The second pic (Lightning_bridle.jpg) shows a Lightning bridle by itself. Since the color used on the pin stop is different than the bridle, it is easier to see. The pin is on this bridle and you can see that it slides freely. The bottom arrow points to the end of the bridle that attaches to the canopy.

I believe the pin and pin stop are made of 900 lb. braided Dacron line.

I'm not recommending this type of bridle for BASE--I would not use it--but it does work well for CRW. A couple of things to keep in mind, though:

• For some reason Spectra seems to be less reliable than the braided Dacron. I have personally had to cutaway from a Triathlon that had a similar deployment setup but the bridle was Spectra.


• I have heard that pullout PCs seem to have fewer bridle malfunctions on this type of system than throwout PCs.


• I have had a cutaway from a knotted up Dacron bridle but it is a rarity.

Again, I would not recommend this type of bridle for BASE. I'm just passing this info along as a data point.

Walt

Thanks for posting that. That is a pretty cool way to get the bridle to retract like that. I have never seen in person(up close anyways) how that works.

Thanks for the Pics Walt!

Justin
388

For anyone interested, I should mention that the Triathlon is available with a similar system but the routing is different. It has two rings on the center cell (next to each other) and one ring each the two adjacent cells. The bridle attaches in the center and is then routed to one side, then the other side, then back through the unused center cell ring.

Walt

Better known as 550 cord