What do we do with a Buddy wing?

I bought a Buddy Tekwing. I always intended to replace the ABS plate with steel. So why didn't I just get a Redwing? Because I'm not one of your "must look cool" divers, and I didn't want an all-black piece of equipment. Plus I wanted the ABS plate for holiday diving, and the cambands etc - basically, it wasn't so much buying a complete wing setup as buying a wing and a bunch of spare parts.

There were two things which I immediately thought "That's got to go" - the corrugated hose arrangement, and the harness.

To start with, the hose: this had two things I didn't like. Firstly, it was way too long - it wouldn't have looked out of place on an elephant's face. Seconds, it has a pull-dump elbow on it.

Now, I'm not one of those clueless n00bs who thinks that pull-dumps wear out the corrugated hose. I know there's a bit of string between the dump and the inflate unit. I'd actually have preferred to keep the pull-dump on the wing.

Unfortunately, the damn thing was so bulky, it wouldn't fit between the wing & twinset. It was just too big.

So, I replaced the dumping elbow with a standard non-dumping one. And I chopped a large section of corrugated hose off the end - so the inflate sits at around collarbone level, instead of kidney height.

That was the first thing I changed. The harness was the next thing I went for. I used it for a few dives, but never got on with it. The problems were:

• Webbing. Horrible, horrible webbing. Soft and flimsy, the damn stuff twisted itself into knots every time I put the harness on. Worse, it slipped through all the triglides and so forth, so you'd get the shoulder straps nicely set up, pull the waist strap tight, and then the whole thing would slide down your back as all the slack in the shoulders went into the waist. Tried to fix it by replacing the smooth triglides with the toothed ones, but no dice. I never managed to get the harness well set-up.
• Crotch straps. Two stupid loops of narrow webbing that go around your legs. Same slidy problem as the main harness, plus they were a sod to find when you put the rig on. Silly little pinch clips... gahh!
• Shoulder clips. Came undone when I was loading my rig into the car. NOT impressed! Plus due to slidy webbing, they were always in the wrong place.
• Danglies. Because the harness is sized to fit everybody, and can be adjusted on both sides of the waist strap, and there's two shoulder straps, there are a multitude of ends of webbing on the harness, which hang all over the place.
• Cambands. The two sets of twin cambands were a total PITA - it was so difficult to get the twinset fixed in place by these bands without it being crooked that when I finally got it right, I never took the twinset off again until I was ditching the cambands for good.

So basically, there was nothing I liked about the harness arrangement. It was with a huge sigh of relief that I took delivery of my Combro steel plate and a roll of stiff webbing from my local shop.

I used a soldering iron to punch holes into the wing in the appropriate places, inserted brass eyelets, and grinned like a lunatic as I saw that I was free of the tyranny of awkward cylinder-attaching forever.

The steel plate I configured with a Hogarthian harness - one piece of webbing, no shoulder clips. Once appropriately sized, I cut off the excess. I used softer webbing as a crotch strap, a nice 2" wide piece, very comfy. I used wing nuts to fix the backplate on the twinset, with the wing sandwiched between.

That was all the changes I made for a while. I toyed with putting a pull-dump cord on the top right dump, but it didn't work out.

The next changes were largely cosmetic - I removed the triglides, D-rings, and bottle-holding sleeve from the wing. The triglides are supposed to have the waist strap threaded through them to prevent tank wrap on single cylinders. I use a twinset and don't like the idea of a waist strap that'll get tighter as you inflate the wing, so ditched them. The D-rings I just never used, they were an appendix I didn't need. Same for the bottle-holding sleeve, since I don’t like or use suicide bottles.

That's about it. Of the original Tekwing, only the core wing remains. The harness and various superfluous widgets have been pruned mercilessly away.

So what would I advise anybody else looking at the Buddy wings as a potential Next Buy?

Buy one. But, unless the colour REALLY matters to you, buy a Redwing. You might be able to get a Redwing supplied in red or yellow if you ask - give it a try. At the same time, ask for it to be supplied with a non-dumping elbow on the corrugated hose, and no bottle or autoair.

The Redwing puts the corrugated hose on the right. It's dead easy to move it tho - just unscrew the corrugated hose, unscrew the dump valve, and swap the two over. Job done.

Buy a metal backplate - either a Combro (or other) steel, or a Dive Rite (or other) aluminium. If you pay more than £40 for a plate, you're being ripped off.

Put the plate in the appropriate place, and use a soldering iron to burn holes thru the fabric of the wing. Use an eyelet kit from a camping store or haberdashers to line the holes. Twinsets tend to use 8mm bolts, make the holes bigger than this - I use 10mm eyelets myself.

Leave the side D-rings on for a while, and the triglides if you've got them. Make sure you're never going to want to use them before you chop them off.

Sounds like a bit of a damning indictment of Buddy wings, that long list, doesn't it? Having second thoughts?

You shouldn't. What it boils down to is this: Buddy wings are superb. They're tough, reliable, and very cheap compared to a lot of other wings. Their only fault is that they have some superfluous bits & bobs. Trim the excess, and you're left with a damn good wing!