Posting to the "tailgate hangup" thread about "little things" reminded me of an experience which may be valuable to those of you who use pin rigs.

I remember an incident involving CRW gear which used the "floating pin" style of container closure. In this set-up, the pin floated on a piece of 900-lb dacron bridle. There was a knot in the bridle which sat on the canopy side of the pin, and acted as a "stop" to pull the pin.

Imagine your hand wrapped around the bridle so that your fingers are curving in the same direction as the pin (tips of your fingers to the tip of the pin). Clearly there is a "handedness" here. The pin can either be put on left-handed (holding the bridle so that your thumb points toward the pilot chute, the pin curves the same way as the fingers on your left hand), or right-handed.

If the bridle was passed through the pin in one direction, it worked fine. If it was passed in the other direction then force applied to the pin would just torque it into the container, and a pilot chute in tow was the likely result.

The difference becomes clear if you set the pin on its edge in the closing loop (so the tip and the circle are away from the container). In the proper configuration, the bridle passes cleanly from the top to the bottom through the circle. Otherwise, it forms kind of a "hitch" around the circle which is not so obvious when the pin is lying on its side.

I'm not sure if this is an issue with two-pin containers, but as I recall one of the pins is floating. This might be a good thing to check on such a system...

Michael