You've probably all seen these pictures of "The smallest Russian
Submarine"
Got me thinking, he's got some sort of knob on the top of his dome,
for what purpose I don't know. With a blown dome where the apex is half
the diameter of the
base & is the weakest point, (provided the inner flange bend is
reinforced) could it be strengthened by either building up with a methyl
methacrylate monomer (liquid acrylic) & fiberglass or carbon fibre, or
tipping the dome upside down into a mold of liquid acrylic.
The bond should be 100% & it's under compression so won't tear
apart. ( would need annealing)
The blown dome I'm having made is 25mm thick, so at the apex should
be 12.5mm thick.
At 25mm it has a crush depth of 3,300ft at 12.5 it has a crush depth
of 1,051ft. I'm not sure wether it gets thinner in a linear
progression from base to apex, but if it
did & was reinforced half way down to the 18.75mm thickness it
would increase the crush depth to 2,425ft.
I'm not considering going down deeper but just increasing my margin
of safety, & others after me that can't afford a cast dome.
Any thoughts on this one?
Alan
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Saturday, August 22, 2009
9:45 AM
Subject: Re: [PSUBS-MAILIST] GOTTA
SEE VIDEO
Hi Dean. Although I've seen it before,
this version had English. A real treat.
I know there's a lot of critics who laugh but I still think it was
pretty cool.
I remember seeing an article about him building it a while back
too.
He had a set of instructions he
was reading while it was down and leaking. He looked a little
nervous.
There was something about him "retiring" the
sub circulating last year. If that's true, maybe he lost
interest or got scared about the leaks.
The next youtube about "Eric and his submarine" was another I've
seen. That sub looked quite nice and moved through the water well.
I wish we could get more of our guys to make videos and share them
with us. I for one love seeing them.
Frank D.
