Re: crude childhood submersible death-trap fun

[Michael B Holt <michaelbholt@juno.com>]

On Fri, 16 Jul 1999 23:23:10 -0500 David Buchner writes:
>I picked up an old paperback at a junk store a couple years ago,
"Nautilus
>90 North," by the guy who was captain when Nautilus went under the polar
>icecap. He briefly mentioned "playing submarine" in the river when he
was a
>kid -- some contraption based on an upside-down rowboat. 

I have that book around here.   Somewhere.   I think all submariners
claim
to have done things like that.

>How many kids 
>did this stuff, and are any of them very successful (i.e., do they spend
all
>week pounding nails into dad's boat and then it keeps tipping over and
>sinking and they give up and leave it on the bottom?)?

Nothing I ever did worked right.   Well, it sort of worked right.

>And are kids still
>doing things like this, or is it all TV and videogames now? 

I tried to interest my son and his buddies in this sort of thing.   He
never
did anything.   Spent too much time playing Star Wars games.

>I guess my
>friends and I were a sort of interim stage -- we *talked* a lot about
>building stuff like pump-supplied diving hats and ultralight airplanes,
but
>mostly just watched movies on those big plastic videodiscs. Built one 
>wing, and put one 25-horse outboard on a 12-foot sailboat... took a lot
of 
>stuff *apart*...

I built the essentials of a Rogallo wing ultralight, using a parachute.  
I needed
more wingspan, but it was enough to lift my buddy Jeff and his bicycle
(the
power source) a foot or so off the ground.     I should get another
scrapped
parachute and try again . . . . 

(Didn't that 25Hp outboard sink the 12-foot sailboat?)

In general, we talked about it much more than we did it.   That was true
of girls, too.

I did draw a self-propelled diving bell.   The idea was to have a bell
that
would float out into the local pond and then drop to the bottom (about
eight feet, the old man told us, at the dam).    My parents put a stop to
that
when I was experimenting with the design in the bathtub, and I asked for
some aluminum sheet. 

>Why do fisticuffs and general huge list traffic happen whenever I don't
pay
>attention for a couple days?

You're just lucky, I guess.   I just went through the exact same thing on
two other lists.

>You mean Lloyd Bridges like in those Airplane movies?

Yes.   Before he did that, he played diver Mike Nelson in the TV series
"Sea Hunt."



Mike Holt
-- 

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