How To Build Your Own DIY Custom Sidemount Harness
It’s pretty easy (and cheap!) to make a DIY custom sidemount harness for yourself. All the components can be bought off-the-shelf at any decent dive center; with the exception of the sidemount shoulder and lumbar plates, which you’ll need to either get from a good specialist sidemount retailer or design your own and have the plates cut to order.
Webbing is very cheap and easy to replace, so I’d advocate going for comfort rather than brute ruggedness and ultra longevity. It’s not fun if your harness rubs you. That said, you must have some stiffness in the spine and waist webbing to stop the harness kinking under load.
A really luxurious harness will use three or four different types of webbing. The spine strap should be stiff rigid polyamide (resin reinforced) webbing for stability. This can also be used for waist webbing if you aren’t going with a continuous approach. The shoulder harness can be a softer polypropylene webbing for comfort. You can buy crotch straps as ready-made kits, and they should be very soft and thin webbing.
Locate the shoulder plate
Measure down to the lumbar plate (just above the cleft of your buttocks). Prepare a spine webbing strap to match that length.
Attach the rear bungee hardware on the spine strap and thread the webbing between the shoulder plate and lumbar plate.
Thread the shoulder webbing onto the shoulder and lumbar plates.
Note the webbing route through the sidemount shoulder plate
Thread the shoulder D-rings and bungee attachment retainers onto the harness shoulder straps.
Complete rigging the shoulder harness straps
Adjust the sidemount harness shoulder webbing to fit. The spine strap should not be loose once the shoulder straps are correctly sized.
Thread on the waistbelt hardware: 2x rear offset/square D-rings and attachment points for the sidemount cylinders
Position the belt buckle centrally on the left-side waist belt webbing
Trim off any excess harness webbing
Position the shoulder D-rings just beneath the collarbones
Position the waist belt D-rings appropriately for you cylinders and bungee method
Measure from waist buckle to lumbar plate to determine crotch strap length
Measure out and thread on the crotch strap
Check that the crotch strap is snug, the waist buckle is just above the pubic region and the lumbar plate is just above the cleft of the buttocks
Attach your sidemount bungees
If setting up for loop bungees, you’d also need:
1x Metal Weight Belt Retainer / Tri-Glide: or dedicated rear loop bungee attachment
2x Metal Weight Belt Retainers / Tri-Glides w/20cm 55o cord: or 50x8mm (2″ x 0.3″) rubber o-rings
Currently residing in Subic Bay, Philippines; he has amassed more than 10,000 open-circuit and CCR dives over three decades of challenging diving across the globe.
Andy has published numerous diving magazine articles and designed advanced certification courses for several dive training agencies, He regularly tests and reviews new dive gear for scuba equipment manufacturers. Andy is currently writing a series of advanced diving books and creating a range of tech diving clothing and accessories.
Prior to becoming a professional technical diving educator in 2006, Andy was a commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force and has served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Belize, and Cyprus.
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