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Hi Frank, I've done several sanding test on the Rattleguard product, and it was pretty easy to sand off if you needed to do a repair. It how ever had epoxy as part of it's mix, which I believe is what made it more sandable. I can go get a sample of the Turboliner polyurea sprayed on some steel from my local buddy, and I have a sample of the brand of polyurea that my other buddy uses called Polyshield from http://www.specialty-products.com/index.php?page=polyshield-ss-100 that I can test. I expect the polyurea to be more elastic, and thus harder to sand. There is many ways I could try to insulate my sub, but the hassle your just described of removing the insulation after every dive to dry it, is exactly what I'm trying to avoid. Have you seen the pictures of the interior of Alec's K-250. There's to much going on in there to be wanting to remove insulation without taking the whole interior apart. Even though I'll have a little more room in mine since I won't have the hard VBT and two of the SCUBA tanks, since they will be mounted externally. I think it might of been Vance or Jay that was working on a refit of a sub that needed to have syntactic foam removed. I usually like to make every thing easily removable, but in this case I'm needing to do some thing different. The polyurea elastomer coating that covers the hot dipped galvanizing, is planned to allow flexing between the syntactic foam and steel. I doubt that said sub refit mentioned had that same configuration. Besides removing syntactic foam from the inside of a sub would be fun. Sorta like removing cured concrete from the inside of a concrete truck with stick of dynamite. ;} As we say at Rendezvous when a cannon goes off, MORE POWDER Regards, Szybowski From: ShellyDalg@aol.com Date: Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:24:27 -0400 Subject: Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] Condensation Reduction Means To: personal_submersibles@psubs.org Hi Brent. Thanks for the bedliner info. The more I read about it, the more interesting it sounds. Have you tried to remove any of it yet? I'm wondering how difficult it would be to replace and/or repair.
On the inside foam thing, it seems like a lot of work and expense for what you get. Once that stuff is applied, it will be a real pain to take out should it become needed for a repair or future modification. I can't imagine how hard it will be to chip that stuff away while sitting inside a little tank, with all the ribs and linkages etc.
I remember a thread quite a while ago where some one had to remove some foam for a retro-fit and they were saying it was a huge mess. Was it on "Aquarius" or some other hi-tech expensive sub? Can't remember just which one but it sounded like a very expensive and difficult process.
As for moisture inside the sub, I don't think there's any way to avoid that. For my sub, I'm just going to make it easy to remove the water once it dribbles down to the lowest point, and make sure I can see all the corners and nooks to monitor for corrosion.
With your plan of flooding the sub regularly as a training exercise, it seems like reducing any chance of water hiding in tiny places would be a better solution than trying to prevent condensation from forming.
All boats get wet on the inside, it's just how it is. Making it easy to clean and dry out is the key to reducing corrosion. It might be possible to add "blanketed" insulation at a reasonable cost that could be removed easily, aired out, and dried between dives. That would add sound deadening and maybe help keep you warm a bit.
As for smoothing the interior, could you make curved sections of foam that fit between the ribs, coat them with the bedliner stuff, and make them removable so cleaning would be easy. You could hose off the foam pieces, dry them off, and just snap them back in after cleaning out the sub.
I know that a steel tank will flex and move as it goes through pressure cycles, with temperature changes making it even more pronounced. If you have that foam applied to the inside, I'd worry about separation and/or cracks where water could hide and be very difficult to detect.
I like the idea of the bedliner stuff deadening sound when applied to the outside. Pretty interesting stuff.
Frank D.
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