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Has anyone used the Viking Bayonet style dry gloves that turn and lock in?  Can they be used with a wrist seal still in place?  How'd you like them?  Pros?  Cons?  Also open to hear good points of other dry glove systems.

I have the Bayonets mounted on my DUI suit with latex zip seals in place.  So far they are pretty nice and easy to don/doff.  The only thing I don't like about them is the location of the tabs on the rings.  If I have a glove failure or leak while getting in the water, I cannot just pull a backup glove over the rings and continue.  I can do that with the SiTech rings on my BARE suit.  I will have to get out of the water and reseat or replace the glove itself with the Bayonet system on my DUI.

So far, I have used the old viking rings, the bayonet system and the SiTech rings (glued permanent rings).  So far, I like the glued permanent SiTech the best.  Easy wrist seal replacement, docking rings are pretty easy to use, multiple glove options and you can pull a glove over the outer docking ring if you have a failure.  The old viking rings work really well on existing seals if you like to use a chemical style stretchy glove (see my avatar).  If you are focused on using a coated fabric glove (eg blue smurfs) you are going to have to use a docking ring.  I would prefer the SiTech system on my DUI but Chris tried to mount it on a demo DUI suit and couldn't get it to work, something about the seals being too thin to seat the system well enough.  I prefer the smurf gloves and received the bayonets for a gift so thought I would give them a try for awhile.

I helped a guy that uses the Viking Bayonet system with a glove on the boat last weekend. One of the large o-rings on the "suit cuff" side kept un-seating and looked like a potential problem. I would stick wth the Si-Tech system or the Viking rubber rings and pull over gloves Todd mentioned in his post above.

We've discussed the issue of rings pretty extensively on thedecostop.  Here are a few threads discussing it.




Regarding the bayonet rings, I've been using the standard Viking rings since '99, except for a year when I have the Bayonet Rings a try.  They worked adequately, but I ended up switching back to the standard Viking rings for a number of reasons.  The major reason was that the Bayonet rings were often insanely hard to remove after a dive.  Especially when I'd get a bit of dirt into the groove, it would often take the help of another diver or a pliers in order to remove it.  I took to only rotating them 3/4 of the way to fully locked to avoid this.  I never had issues with leaking or the gloves falling off - the retention mechanism is very secure - but always felt they were too difficult to remove.  The other reason I switched was that they require a plastic piece to be installed on the glove, so it's more difficult to quickly swap in a spare glove when one is ripped or lost before a dive, or to use multiple sets of gloves when one set gets wet inside.  None of my buddies were using the Bayonet rings - everyone had conventional Viking rings - which was another good reason to switch.  We've also been using agricultural gloves that pull over both rings and are very easy to install and remove solo.

Ethan

Agricultural gloves?

They're available at Fleet Farm (sadly not at Farm and Fleet) on the aisle between horse veterinary stuff and hydraulic cylinders and fittings.

Ethan

Dang I miss Fleet Farm.

We have one here in Beaver Dam.  I´ll have to check out the gloves.  Thanks.

Beaver Dam is the closest one for us - that's where we usually buy them too!

Do you mean the blue nitrile milking gloves that come in bags of 24 for like 3.99?  They seem kind of thin, but is all that I could see there.