The first piece of equipment you need to think about when putting together a sidemount rig is the harness and wing. Although you can use most regular BCD configurations to dive sidemounted tanks, if you are serious about sidemount diving and want to attain the best possible results, purchasing a harness and wing that are especially designed for sidemount diving will greatly increase your chances of successfully acheiving all the necessary skills you will learn to safelty and effectively dive sidemounted cylinders. These ready to go setups are designed to keep the cylinders in the right place and along with various made-to0fit accessories, your sidemounting experiences will be alot more enjoyable.
The butt plate is positioned at the bottom of the harness system. It has rails that are use as attachment points for the lower part of the cylinders. The rails can also be used to clip off other pieces of equipment such as reels and other stage cylinders. The are also a convienient place to mount a cannister light.
If you already own an excisting harness and wing, you maybe able to purchase a butt plate seperately and add it to your harness to make it more sidemount friendly. A crotch strap attached to the bottom section of the butt plate helps prevent the whole harness system riding upwards.
The two most common ways to attach rigging to your cylinders is by either using a webbing cam strap (good for different sized cylinders) or a stainless worm band. The webbing cam strap is easy to take off and on and is great for travelling divers who do not know what sized tanks thay will be using at their destination.
The stainless worm bands are alot more secure and will not loosen when wet. The choice will be determined by where you dive and what tanks you dive with. Also, the other rigging you will use to secure the tanks to the harness will need to be appropriate for the bands that you choose to use.
The two most popular bungee system are the normal bungees or the ring bungees. The normal bungee system consists of a lenght of bungee which has a Quicklink clip on one end and a Boatsnap clip on the other end. The Quicklink end is secured to the back of the harness while the other end is secured to the top D-ring on the front of the harness with the bungee going under you arm pit. The purpose of the bungee is to secure the top of the cylinder snuggly under your arms. The ring bungee system is very similar other than is differs in the way you secure the tank to the bungee. In this case it does not wrap around the tank valve but is secured via a choked clip around the cylinder valve that then clips onto the ring on the bungee.
Although you can go out and purchase an entire new set of regs and gauges for side mounting, you will be surprised as to how much of your exsisting gear you can use to put together a very effective sidemount setup. If you are already a twin tank back mount diver you will probably have everything you need already less a few differnet sized hoses.
You will require two first stages, two second stages, 2 SPG's with 6 inch hoses, two cylinders preferrably with opposite pointing valves and a few short LP inflator hoses for your Wing and a drysuit if you are using one. There a various ways to configure your reg set depending in the setup and harness.
