| 2007 Convention Speakers |
| 2007 Convention Speakers |
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Hands-on Welding Demonstration
Application of Acrylic to Submersibles Joan Stachiw will be speaking on behalf of her late husband Dr. Jerry D. Stachiw, a US Navy staff scientist and author of Handbook on Acrylics for Submersibles, Hyperbaric Chambers and Aquaria. Dr. Stachiw was past-chairman of ASME Ocean Engineering Division and a member of the ASME Committee on Safety Standards for Pressure Vessels for Human Occupancy. Under his leadership as the Chairman of Subcommittee on Viewports in the ASME PVHO Safety Standard Committee from 1972 to 1987, the safety standard for acrylic viewports was written, edited and published in 1977 as an ASNI/ASME PVHO Safety Standard. He is a member of the Marine Technology Society, New York Academy of Science, Sigma Xi, Phi Kappa Phi, Pi Tau Sigma, and Pi Mu Epsilon Honorary Societies.
K-250 Diving Video and 2006 Convention Diving Video Alec Smyth operates a K-250 submersible and has a 2 person submersible of his own design under construction. He has found that submersibles make good educational tools, and makes occasional presentations to students in his free time. Alec has filmed and edited several short videos to support these presentations.
Pressure Hull Welding 101 Reading Jules Verne's "20,000 Leagues under the Sea" as a child inspired a life-long interest in submarines and underwater exploration, a fascination so strong it influenced a career path into the metal trades to gain the necessary skills to build his own submersible. Becoming a certified welder in 1978 led to working as a Boilermaker. He has spent the past 28 years working in the construction and repair of nuclear and fossil fuel power plants, oil refineries and oil storage facilities. This has provided a wealth of experience and insight into the fabricating and welding of steel and stainless steel pressure vessels and structures. He has qualified to numerous welding certifications and procedures approved by ASME, AWS and API. He bought drawings for a K-350 from George Kittredge in 1983. 2000 hours and 15 years of part-time work fulfilled the dream of having his own "Soucoupe". A sport diver since the mid-1970's, a bell/saturation diving course at the Commercial Diving Center in Wilmington, CA rounded out his formal dive training in 1982. His waking moments are spent pondering manned submersibles, ROVs, AUVs, shipwrecks and marine geology. His current project is a welded aluminum catamaran support vessel.
Diving Operations 101 Vance Bradley watched Cousteau's World Without Sun for the first time in the old Paramount Theater on Church Street, downtown in his native Nashville, Tennessee. He was seventeen that year, thin as a rake, and already dreaming of the sea, and submarines. A decade and a half later he was in Egypt, piloting one of Jean Francois Durand's Perry submersibles through the oldest in-water oil field on earth, right under the frowning brow of the Sinai Peninsula. At the time, he wasn't much more than a stone's throw (comparatively speaking) from Shab Rumi, in the Sudan, the location for the Precontinent II underwater living experiment that had so entranced him as a teen-ager. He figured at the time that he had come full circle. Captain Cousteau agreed, and said that he would hold in his heart the skinny kid with big dreams, who believed that anything was possible. And you can't beat that kind of thing for incentive. Vance has made a habit of doing the unexpected, and making it work. He ran computers when 96K of RAM required ten tons of air conditioning and round the clock engineers. Later, he went to Florida and told the Perry people that he wanted to drive submarines. They didn't laugh. Instead, they gave him a forklift to practice on, and six months after that he was making his first submersible dives in the North Sea. Subsequently, he spent thousands of hours underwater over a decade of offshore work, qualified as pilot for nine different manned submersible vehicles, and was one of the most senior of Intersub's pilots during the wild construction days in the North Sea. He's been under some part of nearly every major piece of water in the world, sometimes way under. Eventually, he left the submersible field to work in commercial nuclear power which is tantamount, in his view, to jumping from the frying pan into the fire. Nowadays, he writes, and works on his Sunday submarine (his third), and rides his motorcycles. He and his childhood sweetheart have been married forty years this October. They have two beautiful daughters, each with children of their own. All of them think Vance is eccentric, which suits him just fine. He says it's way too late to try and be a regular guy--whatever that is.
Contingency Planning, Rescue & Escape, Submersible Escape Simulator Demonstration Jay Jeffries has been interested in submarines since a young child having grown up in a family with a rich history in subs going back to Simon Lake. He was trained in the US Navy as a Nuclear Mechanist Technician specializing in nuclear water chemistry and radiation health controls, serving aboard the submarines USS Bluefish (SSN-675) and USS Sea Devil (SSN-664). After naval service, he received a bachelor's degree in ocean engineering and went on to work for Electric Boat developing submarine systems. For the past 30 years, Jay has supported the US Navy as a contractor by developing underwater special operations gear, hyperbaric and mixed gas diving support systems, and aircrew survival equipment. He is currently employed on Andros Island in the Bahamas by a contractor supporting submarine operations on the Navy's Atlantic Undersea Testing & Evaluation Center (AUTEC). An avid diver, his hobbies include searching for and diving on sunken submarines using his large library of submarine books for research. Jay also collects submarine qualification insignia from around the world and is currently studying naval architecture to design better PSUBS.
Seaker100 Accident Jon Wallace is co-founder of PSUBS and employed as a aoftware engineer for Hewlett-Packard, and provides software and technical support for the PSUBS website and mailing list. He holds a PADI Open Water diving certificate and his interest in submersibles stems from his scuba diving experiences in the cold waters of New England. "I was tired of being cold and only having about 30 minutes of dive time with a steel tank"
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