Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] SUBSAFE

[thomasj@sullivan.ms]

Here - hear,

Welcome aboard!   All great groups need strong research and development...  And 
all the background work to support the best interests of the Group.

God knows,  that's how this Group was formed and continues to be well kept.

Tom Sullivan
Santa Rosa, California


On Sun, 30 Jun 2002 01:15:39 EDT SeaLordOne@aol.com wrote:
>Shipmates,
>
>Although some folks are absolutely sick of this thread, I love it!  I find it 
>absolutely fascinating when a range of different folks get down to first 
>principles: why I joined Psubs, what I hope to get out of it, what I am 
>willing to put into it, what it would take to drive me out of it.  I would 
>like to share my story, for those who are interested.
>
>I joined this site because I am planning to build a Psub in 5 years and want 
>to learn all I can about how to do it right.  I turn 55 this year, and at age 
>60 I will retire and begin construction of a large dry sub, like Carsten's  
>(well, a poor man's Carsten's).  I designed and built a wet sub in 1973.  I 
>had a ball with it, but is was poorly designed and I lived with the 
>constraints that the design imposed.  It was poorly designed because I was 
>unable to find much information on building back-yard submarines.  I read all 
>I could find in Popular Mechanics and Mechanics Illustrated magazines, and 
>away I went.
>
>Over the last 30 years I have continued to collect articles, books, movies, 
>and whatever I could find on small submarines.  Then I found Psubs.  Brian 
>Danielson told me about the site.  Wow, here is where I am going to learn 
>whatever I am going to learn.  I immediately adopted three goals, which I 
>maintain to this day:
>
>#1.  Learn what I can
>#2.  Share what I can
>#3.  Build the community
>
>As far as learning what I can, I am certainly doing that.  As far as sharing 
>what I can, I have been a bit remiss.  I have not shared much about "the 
>Undaunted", but I will.  She is still sitting in my garage, after all these 
>years, so it is not too late to take photos and record measurements.  And I 
>think I was the first one to bring the Coast Guard publication "Guidance for 
>Certification of Passenger Carrying Submersibles" to the attention of the 
>Psubs community.  And I suspect in the future I will be a leader in helping 
>the Psubs community come to terms with the legal and regulatory foundations 
>of Psub development, because of my backgroud in regulation and certification. 
> I hope to contribute more in this are in the future.
>
>I feel my major contribution to the community to date has been in the area of 
>building the community.  I identified, located, retrieved and am in the 
>process of distributing the "lost Busby's".  That took almost two years of 
>working the system from the inside.  And I would like to think that by 
>providing every Psubber (who wants one) a copy of the most basic of Psubs 
>textbooks, I am helping to raise the baseline expertise of the community.  I 
>will also work to provide a CD copy and a website for the Busby Book, for the 
>time when the originals run out.  Once that task is complete, I will engage 
>in another community-building project, as yet to be determined.
>
>I believe that the significance of the Busby Books is that it demonstrates 
>that you can make an important contribution to the Psubs community without 
>knowing anything about submairnes.   I may know a little something about 
>submarines, but I did not have to apply any of that knowledge to get the 
>Busby Books.  To build a submarine you have to know a lot about submarines.  
>But to build a community of submarine-building resources (people, 
>information, tools), not everyone has to know how to build a submarine.  The 
>most important information in such a system is the information about 
>submarine-building, and the most important people in such a system are those 
>who have built submarines, but those who have not yet built a submarine have 
>something to contribute.  Those "apprentices" who what to "learn the trade" 
>can still contribute in other ways.
>
>I was planning to write quite a bit more, but it is past 1 AM and I am 
>falling asleep at the wheel.  So I will continue this thought in a later 
>post.
>
>Doug Farrow
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