I was wearing my Triton powered respirator last week and realized that
I wasn't getting any air through it. Put the little tester that they
provide on it and the ball didn't move. Charged it. The ball moved
up about 1/3 of the way to where it's supposed to be. Replaced the
filters. No change. Rebuilt the battery pack. No change.
Somewhere along the way I noticed a little breeze on my fingers when I
was holding the tester on the filter/blower unit. Inspected the cap
carefully and found that the rubber gasket was crushed and the groove
it fits into was closed up a little bit in the way of the latches.
Sealed it as best I could with electrical tape and the ball moved up
to 2/3 of where it needs to be. Pulled the rubber seal out of it,
took a hot air gun to the cap, and managed to get the groove spread
out to about where it's supposed to be, then ran a piece of 18-gage
hookup wire from Radio Shack down around the bottom of the groove for
the gasket for a spacer and put the gasket back. Closed it up, and
the ball went right up to the top.

So, I'm posting this in the hope that someone else encountering the
same problem will find it and not have to go through so much effort to
repair it--all it really needed was to put a spacer under the gasket..

Incidentally, the battery pack uses five 5000MaH D-cell NiCds and a
"dumb" charger that's really just a 9v wall-wart. I rebuilt the pack
with 10000 MaH NiMH and got a smart charger, both from
http://www.all-battery.com/. I picked theirs because they were the
only ones I could find with solder tabs. Make sure to put some extra
insulation under the positive tabs--if they manage to short on the
edge of the battery case (the insulation there is thinner than it
should be IMO) then they glow red-hot and melt (DAMHIKT)--those
batteries can put out some serious current. The smart charger will
also work with the factory NiCds.


--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)