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Hot take: The vis trim on a Kirby 901 hat is way too stiff for hard hat diving
I was down in Port Fourchon last month doing a bell dive on a platform riser repair, and I noticed something weird. About half the guys on the barge were wearing those Kirby 901 hats with the stiff vis trim, and they were all swapping out their standard visor bolts for brass ones because the stock ones kept snapping off in the current. Meanwhile the other half were still rocking the older Kirby 500 with the softer trim and had zero issues. I asked one of the older tenders about it and he just laughed and said the 901 trim is made for oilfield cleanup, not for underwater bolt work. Has anyone else run into this problem where the trim catches on everything when you're trying to do fine manipulation?
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felixlee3d ago
Oh man, that stiff vis trim is a nightmare for fine work! I remember doing a pipeline inspection off Galveston a few years back and my buddy's 901 got hung up on a cathodic protection anodes for like ten minutes before he could wiggle free. The guys with the older 500s were just laughing at him while he was cussing up a storm underwater (you know how that goes). It's almost like the designers never actually tried to do any delicate manipulation in current with that thing. The brass bolt swap is a smart workaround though, I might have to try that myself next time I'm dealing with the 901.
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Why not just grind down the stiff trim edge a bit with a file before the dive? I did that on my 901 and it stopped snagging on everything without ruining the visor.
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lane.cameron3d ago
Man, that older tender knew exactly what he was talking about. I've had my 901 snag on a valve handwheel during a simple anode change and spent twenty minutes wrestling with it like a caught fish, while @felixlee just floated there waiting. The stiff trim is like wearing a suit of hooks down there, perfect for scraping barnacles off a platform leg but useless when you need to actually feel what your hands are doing. It's almost like the engineers designed it in a lab full of dry chairs and never got their hair wet once.
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