A post on my favorite message board, OntarioDiving.com prompted me to write this entry on my home made goodman handle. I own an OMS Phantom, 10W HID light. The light came with a soft goodman handle that the head clips into and it SUCKS! Just look at that flimsy thing.

  I had several bad experiences with this product. The first was on a river dive with a sport diver buddy of mine, on my request he unclipped my handle / lighthead. Unfortunately the head came out of the snap-in handle and the goodman went down river. So I got a new soft handle and actually tied the head to the handle with some cave line. Then on my GUE dirf course, my instructor told me to get a real goodman handle.

 So I attacked this one “head” on so to speak, and made my own. I picked up some flat aluminum stock, some aluminum tube that felt good in my hand and headed for the shop. I made a prototype that was fairly simple, fixed and used the original clip for the head.

How I made the prototype;

The prototype was made using nothing but a vice and hammer for bending the steel, drill for making the holes an angle grinder with a cutting disc to narrow down the sides where the handle sits.

I used some threaded rod a bit longer than the aluminum tube to secure the handle to the frame.

Used some plastic caps with a hole drilled in the center to position the rod inside the tube. I then filled the tube with hot glue from a glue gun and capped off the other end. Once cured this holds the rod in the center of the tube and you don’t have to do anything silly like bore out an aluminum rod (I just don’t have the tools for that).

 While I liked the design on dry land, on a survey dive the head popped out several times. Once at home scratching my head looking at the design I realized that it would be a bit sloppy in warm water with no gloves on.

Home made goodman handle pt. 2 took these problems into consideration;

Changed the hole for the handle to a slot for adjustability.

Used a clamp to secure the head to the handle.

I still have to put some tubular webbing on the clamp but I am very happy with the design.

Of course as soon as I was finished designing, building, testing, rebuilding and testing again, Chris Moore brought me one he built for me. But I had too much pride in my own design to use his. Thanks anyways Chris. 

 Hopefully this will inspire other Phantom owners to fix their terribly designed goodman handle by throwing that piece of junk out and making something better for nothing more than an hour in the garage.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 15th, 2008 at 10:56 pm and is filed under Skills and Equipment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.