[PSUBS-MAILIST] Re: sub

["Michael B. Holt" <mholt@richmond.edu>]

Sarah Peck wrote:
> 
> hi.  my name is Sarah and I began to build a submarine a year ago.  I was
> mostly fooling around with the idea in a form and function class at art
> school.  Since I decided that I want to begin again with something
> different.  I have begun to study submarines more as well (went to the human
> powered submarine race). 

*sigh*  You are a woman with a demon: submarines.  This is good,
as most women, it seems, think of one's own submarine in the same
way that they think of one's own hippopotamus.

> What I would like to do is build a steel ball that
> can go to the floor of rivers, lakes, or maybe shallow shallow ocean.  I
> want it to work somewhat like a hampster's wheel.  Maybe somehow harnessing
> myself in the middle, so I could move the submarine around.  Is this
> possible at all?  If so where do I begin.  I would like to have drawings and
> models so that I can be sponsored.  Almost all of this is new to me so any
> information no matter how basic helps.

Have you done any drawings yet?  This idea has been done: in the 
60s,  in California.  I'll see if I can find any photos.  What 
was done was a sphere of hexagonal pieces of plexiglas were 
assembled into a ball.  One entered the sphere through a
door made of the hexagons, and then one walked away across
the surface of the water.  So the idea itself is not impossible.

That having been noted, the ball did not 'catch on' because the
wind would take the ball in whatever direction -- it had a 
draft of only a few inches, while it exposed a sphere six
feet across to the wind.  Getting it to move was hard because
there were no paddles outside to catch the water.

This is, to some extent, the idea Simon Lake had with his
Argonaut Junior (1894) and Argonaut I (1896).  The sub
cruised out to the dive site, dropped to the bottom and
crawled (on wheels) across the mud.  It worked.

Welcome to the group.


Mike Holt