Fellow Divers,

I am in a New Product Development class for my master’s degree and our team decided to develop a drying rack for scuba equipment. The next step in the process is to poll the diving community for interest and to help develop customer requirements.

How can you help? I'm glad you asked!! Please take a few minutes to take this very short, 10 question survey:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=788051386231

The survey is 100% anonymous, no personal information will be collected, and you will receive no SPAM as a result of this survey.

Thank you very much for your time!!

Rick
richarddeka@yahoo.com

been done , www.c4aqualine.com has created a rolling PVC rack for drying and storing equipment comes with hangers and hooks for suites dry/wet , BC's mask snorkle fins ect and also tabk rack for under the rack

Thanks for the information. This is not the only product that is out there, but none of them are very portable. You can certainly take it apart, but there are several long pieces and many short pieces that can be lost or cumbersome to carry. It's not something you would pop in your equipment back and take on a beach dive with you.

Again, this is only for a class, so we don't have to actually build it, though it would be fun to design something truly compact.

Thanks again!

That is the kind of thinking that someone was doing when SCUBA gear was invented. Other people had been in the water before with surface supplied air and even primitive rebreathers a hundred years or so before Cousteau ever had his first speedo and red hat. Good luck with your project and your class.
See you at the beach.

Actually, I just found a rack online that pretty much does exactly what I wanted to design for class, so unless I can come up with an even better way to do it, I guess I need to come up with another idea for my class. Thanks to everyone for helping out with this project!!

Also, if anyone is interested, this is the rack I found online: http://www.myscubabuddy.com/scuba.html

Take care,
Rick

How about some kind of a rack that will fit in the back of an SUV or truck bed that holds gear that is already set up (tank, BC, reg, weights, etc...) that slides out so that the diver can back up, put their arms through the shoulder straps, pull the tank up and out of the rack and walk away?

Being an SUV owner and doing weekly beach dives, that's not a bad idea. There are plenty of gear racks, but nothing I know of that will do what you are suggesting. It would likely be a simpler design than my original idea. I'll give this some serious thought and check for competing products. Thanks for the idea!

There is a sliding rack system that fits in the beds of pickups that are used by masons and brick-layers so that they can slide the pallets out to get at the materials on them. This would be a good place to start because they already exist. You'd just need to come up with the rack configuration itself.

My old roomate and I actually built a rack several years ago that sat in the back of my p/u bed between the tailgate and wheel well, In fact Brian u have used it if you remember. We made it out of wood where you can get 4 sets of gear all set up on the tailgate side and put 4 spare tanks on the opposite side. You would open the tailgate, slide the rack to the end of it then turn around and put your arms into the bc.

We would set our gear up at home, put it in the rack and then drive to the beach for our dives. We timed ourselves one time. Shaws Cove, Laguna Beach, from the time we put it in park we were changed into our wetsuits, strapped in, made the way down the stairs did our surf entry and were descending within 10 min.

Our BC's were weight integrated so that was helpful. We would use milk krates to hold our mask, fins, access etc.

I wish I had that rack. It was the coolest way to stow and deploy gear in and out of a vehicle. Look forward to hearing from you soon.