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RE: [PSUBS-MAILIST] SUBSAFE
Doug,
I
greatly appreciate your effort in the distribution of the Busby books. It has
greatly helped me, and I know that it has helped us all. I feel that we need
more people like you, to help our community to expand our knowledge so that we
may build our subs and feel safe in them.
Regards,
Graham
K
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