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Sorry for the late reply. You need to be careful with
syntactic foam. The old Asherah (STAR I) had its main
battery foamed in with syntactic foam which resulted in a major stumbling block
for refurbishment as it was very difficult to remove. This submersible
and a custom built saucer submersible were stored in a warehouse next to where
we docked in Boston. Took forever to rebuild Asherah due to the
syntactic foam and the saucer had major stability and power issues. R/Jay Respectfully, Jay K. Jeffries Andros Is., Bahamas A skimmer afloat is but a submarine, so poorly built it will not
plunge. From:
owner-personal_submersibles@psubs.org [mailto:owner-personal_submersibles@psubs.org]
On Behalf Of Brent Hartwig Hello Frank, Did you say enthusiasm? Be careful what
you wish for. ; )' I've never seen a sub that didn't have
continuous welds on the parts of the stiffeners that contact the outer skin. Do
you know of any I can look at. Not to say that your method isn't good, I just
hadn't heard of it before. I would think it would be a rust nightmare if done
on a steel hull. Unless you back ground the part of the ring that was going up
against the outer skin like you normally would to weld it, and then after
stitch welding it, sand blasted it, epoxy primer it, paint and then fill
the groove with a product like Sika Flex 292 and then Rhino coated the whole
inside of the pressure hull. I hate having to grind and/or
sandblast paint over and over and over and over. There has to be a better
way. That's not to say that all areas
of a sub shouldn't be designed, so you can get to them for inspection and
maintenance later, as you said. That is one on my biggest things I spend
time working up designs for. I've seen so many museum and PSUBs that were not
designed this way, and it made working on them very hard if not impossible,
without doing some very serious cutting. The RV Needlefish, for all it's great
innovations that I learn much from, had allot of areas you couldn't get to with
out destroying the bow, stern, and saddle tanks, to do so. I'm under the
impression that trying to bond fiberglass composite, over and onto a steel
pressure hull wouldn't be a good bond. This being mostly
because they expand and contract at different rates. I would like to hear
from others with more actual experience with composites on this. I'll need to
ask Karl Stanley about this as well, since Idabel has built with composites
attached directly to the paint of the steel hull. Will the steel hull of the R300 try to
expand and contract, at a different rate then the syntactic foam around
it, and in doing so, try to break it. Or will the syntactic foam so insulate
and absorb heat and cold changes, that they work together? I'm thinking about casting syntatic foam
between the internal ribbing of this K-250 I'm working on, by way of infusion
molding it. I will do this after I've installed T stock steel inbetween the
support ribs horizontally, and after I've applied a Rhino type coating to deal
with the expantion and contraction of the steel. The T stock will do basicly
two things, give strength to the hull and keep the syntactic foam from falling
out, since on the K boats the support rings only have under cut areas on one
side, because they are made of rolled angle iron as most of you guys well know. I think I would like to heat
treat the whole completed pressure hull of my sub if I could, like Karl Stanley
did on Idabel. I'm not sure how much it cost him, but I can find out. http://stansub.fotki.com/the_submarine-1/the_submarine_under/heat_treatment.html Regards,
Brent
Harwig |