Nobody likes to spend forever fiddling with their kit as they frantically try to put on all the bits and pieces they want to take with them. You might forget something if you rush, you might miss the tide if you don't rush, you buddy is getting impatient, and those buckles and clips are so fiddly when you're wearing thick gloves...
I wear a compass and a depth gauge & timer on my wrist. I also had a Sensus Pro that I had to find a home for.
The compass was on a buckle that was a bit intricate, and had a habit of slipping loose. The D-timer had a much bigger buckle, but in an awkward place. It also had a lanyard on it, because I was paranoid about loosing it.
It took me FOREVER to get my wrist sorted out.
A modification you may find on some DIR pages is the conversion of a Suunto compass from buckle to bungee straps. I gave this a try, and sure enough, it made the compass easier to get on fast. But there was still that D-timer...
There are wrist slates on the market that have slots in them for a dive computer strap to get threaded through. A nice secure fitting, I believe the idea is.
I decided to take the idea one stage further. I had no great need of a wrist slate, but a wrist unit that could hold my instruments and be easy to put on? THAT I could use.
So I took some of the leftover drainpipe I'd built my torch out of, and carved it up with a hacksaw. Essentially, you just need to cut along the tube in two places. That gets you a nice curved rectangle.
Corners are a bad thing to have in contact with your drysuit, so I rounded them off with four more saw cuts. Then I used sandpaper to smooth off all the edges.
You now have a nice, elongated, curved octagon. Time to add your instruments.
The compass was no problem: Thread bungee through it, thread the bungee through the panel, job done.
The D-timer I was worried about, until I looked at it, and saw it had four little drainage holes in the rubber casing. I drilled four holes into the panel in the appropriate places, and threaded fishing line through it, giving me several separate loops of 3lb monofilament holding the rubber casing to the panel. Then I chopped off the straps, which were no longer needed.
Lastly, the Sensus Pro diver recorder. This needed to be moveable, so I could download from it. String & fishing line tied it to the panel, and a loop of bungee held it in place.
And that was more or less that. Another loop of bungee at the far end, and the whole thing was secure.
Because it's all bungee, no buckles are needed. Because I try and make myself more visible in any way possible, I used reflective bungee. To even out the strain and protect the bungee from abrasion, I threaded it through some clear plastic tubing I had lying around.
And that was that: I had a nice, techie black wrist unit with compass, dive log, depth gauge and dive timer, which I just slide on one-handed. Everything you need on a dive, impossible to loose, no fiddling, and the first day I took it to open water, one of my fellow divers immediately wanted to know how to make one for himself.
It might even be DIR ;)
