Spinlock Deckvest Teardown

There are a number of instances where people have had auto-inflate PFDs fail to do that. This happened to me in my Safety at Sea class and therefore I disassembled the inflating mechanism to understand why!

Photos are here…a more detailed writeup will follow, but I needed an immediate place to publish photos of the disassembled components.

All components of the HAMMAR mechanism
This is the spring/plunger/o-ring and water inlet port
The “brake” mechanism. Once the paper gets wet and breaks, the brake opens up and allows the center portion to rotate — which punctures the CO2 cylinder
The CO2 tap mechanism (note clockspring on right side of photo)