Hi Guys,
You may not like my methods, but I am not inexperienced nor am i ignorant of everything you have said. I have tried it all at some stage and arrived at what I do from thousands of caps spent. Back to discussing pros and cons of stuff you have been mentioning.
1)9mm vs 8mm bits: No thanks, the area to be drilled (If you use the Pi X Radius squared) quite clearly gives you one third extra battery power for 8mm bits. Also in UK you may have more materials and gauges available to you than we do here in Ireland. I had one set of 9mm rods + bits, and i will never do it again. First its impossible to order standard 9mm stuff here and i need to get it 'off the shelf' without especially ordering. Next the caps I use are 7.5mm and super short; with a 9mm hole they sometimes go in on their side==> not very safe because if it dont go off and you put in more, you are causing an unnecessarily big bang. When i cap I am usually drilling between 20 to thirty holes a session, so let's see how far your batteries go on 9mm holes.
2)The carpet: My carpet is thicker than conveyor belt material even though it may not have looked so on the video, its just 'carpeted' on one side. you may think its small, but its bigger than I need and it fits in my capping box with ALL my stuff including two drill batteries.
3)The cleaning rod: I mean for gods sake, someone said it was unsafe to tap down the caps BY HAND when i have done this regularly (when using the larger Hilti caps which I dont normally use) with a lump hammer. THIS is why the god-damned ends of them are rounded off, the firing bit is one edges of the caps, remember?
4)The firing pin: yeah someone else said "I put a heavy thicker steel rod to be further away and take up the recoil" or something like that. Well you keep on doing it, pal. I got sick of it personally and now I dont do it. If I still want to i can screw it on and its still in my capping box. I dont put my face in the way of the firing pin, its impossible or you would smash it with the hammer as you hit it.
5)'My goggles are shit' well whatever, as I PM'd someone earlier I use to use diving tempered glass goggles and i got sick of that too, If you REALLY want to know I rarely use goggles at all (eat that, capping police), and i out my feet on the rock i am going to cap to keep it from hopping up.
6)'Lacking body protection' or some other lame way of saying it. Yeah sure I ended up getting hit by rocks at least once every two capping sessions, for me its part of the job, a bruise for a day or two, and we get on with it.
7)'No gloves' well i did mention 'some people' like to wear gloves. I hate gloves for any aspect of caving that is digging, capping SRT or plain normal stuff, who cares? Sure i end up with some minor capping scrapes and 'sand shrapnel' but in a couple of days its gone.
Remember guys that when I am taking time off to do some capping far from an entrance and a lot need to be done, I want a small load to carry, no danger of my batteries running out, and for my equipment to TODALLY rock. I am not trying to make out that i am hard, (you obviously call it 'stupid' and that's fine by me) but experience is the only thing that will teach you where you can cut back on certain things.
If you didnt like the video thats cool, but despite what you think, in my mind I am in full control of my own :idea:safety issues.
