How small of a limb can you use a CAT® tourniquet on? There's been several studies that have looked to see how small of a limb that you can occlude arterial flow on using a CAT® tourniquet. Basically what they've found is successful use of a CAT® tourniquet down to a 5.1 inch circumference. A toilet paper roll is about six inch circumference.
Coincidentally, if you take the diameter of a CAT® tourniquet at the middle, That's right about five to 5. 1 inches. What I'm using for demonstration purposes is our scaled-down MH6 Little Bird with Rob Miller up front, ready to go on mission. We've got the tail boom marked at a 5.1-inch circumference. I'm going to take the base plate and I'm just going to squeeze on that base plate just to get it to conform around the limb a little bit easier.
And then we just need enough of that adhering band to stick on itself. And now we've got occlusion on the tourniquet through both sides. And there you can see a CAT® tourniquet applied to a 5.1-inch circumference.