The Homemade Submarine
Posted By Craig Williams on 27 February 1999
Not all of Stanley's design, though, has worked. In an early stage, he used two long PVC cylinders to aid the buoyancy of his sub. However, at 200 feet, the cylinders imploded. "The noise was so loud, my first thought was why am I still alive and why is my sub not filling up with water," Stanley said. "The sub was fine, and the cylinders were just an aid, not necessary to bring the sub back to the surface." Stanley no longer uses the cylinders. Stanley comes by this spirit honestly.
Born in Hartford, Connecticut and from a family of Scottish, German and Austrian descent, he personally financed the parts for his sub from part-time jobs while attending Ridgewood High School in New Jersey and then Eckerd College in Florida. Despite his utter lack of training, he used books from his town library to come up with the design.
Stanley built the sub to glide up and down from the depths not using the typical design of a Navy sub. Instead, he attached wings to the sides of the sub that include baffles that alternately hold air and water to help it rise and sink. At the edge of the wings, six scuba tanks (three to each side) provide air to the baffles through stainless steel medical grade tubing. Two electrically powered propellers drive the sub, but they are recent additions (between dives 50 and 60) to the stern portion of the wings. And as I learned from Stanley during the 70th dive, the props are not necessary for the trip.
Nonetheless, when the motor stopped working, I suddenly wished the sub contained a radio or had some other form of contact with the surface. Stanley was nonplused. "We can still descend, and if we want to go faster, we'll just go in circles with one propeller working," he said calmly.
Stanley's 3,000-pound steel creation arose from his own perseverance, and he endured not only skeptical looks of his classmates, but also good-natured ribbing from his family. His parents Bill, a management consultant, and Viola, an elementary school teacher, called it "the pipe in the yard." But only his mother has gone for a ride with her son. "My Dad is so claustrophobic that he won't even look inside it," says Stanley. The small sub makes a sewer drain pipe look big.
The sub is not constructed with luxury in mind, and it takes a contortion-like effort to get inside. Intending it to carry only two passengers, the sub has two, almost three-foot high towers for its occupants with seven, two-inch thick portholes for viewing the sights on the way down. The first tower is situated in the middle of the sub, and the second is well aft, almost at the back. Once you wiggle in, you must lay flat to pull yourself to the rear of the sub and then sit up into the second tower.
However, the back tower was not wide enough to accommodate my shoulders, which were wedged tightly against the sides throughout the one-and-a-half hour dive. With nothing more than a polyester camp chair, the sub is far from comfortable. For good measure to add to the discomfort, once the hatch is bolted, the sub has plenty of humidity (given the tropical temperatures) at the beginning of the dive. Later, the moisture condenses during the dive and drips inside the sub as the outside temperature drops 20 degrees or so upon reaching 700 feet.
What it lacks in comfort, it makes up in wondrous views and a thrilling experience few ever have. At these depths, only a select club of world scientists have had similar opportunities. This club includes members from Scripps Oceanographic Institute in San Diego, California and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Cape Cod, Massachusetts (and, of course, world-famous Jacques Cousteau and Richard Ballard, the discoverer of the Titanic's resting place)
Being a member of that club is not without its disadvantages, though. As we descended, we bottomed out on the sand and rocks at 650 feet several times, scraping the sea floor. Those sounds alone, amplified by the otherworldly quiet, is enough to strike fear in the stout of heart. As I listened to the noise, it conjured up visions of old submarine movies with subs listing sideways, marooned at the bottom of the ocean as the submariners resign themselves to running out of air. Sensing my fear, Stanley reminded me that the sub is 900 pounds buoyant when the baffles are filled with air from the six tanks on the wings. Just like divers, he can also drop two weights from the sub to aid in ascent. As we continued our dive, he added and vented air from the baffles to control the position of the sub with 700 feet of water overhead. Despite his efforts, we hit a rock outcropping on the ocean floor.
I wondered out loud about the strength of the sub's quarter-inch steel skin. Stanley quickly explained that it is stiffened by seven three-and-three-quarter inch ribs and there was no reason to worry. During the predive orientation, Stanley proudly showed off a photo of his sub on the night of its departure from Florida to Roatan. The sub had an untimely meeting with the front end of a car that smashed into the trailer carrying it on the way to its shipping port. Stanley beamed like a proud papa bragging about his son's first bruiser fight while pointing to the picture that showed the sub had won that battle. As I viewed it, the sub bore just a few scratches on its paint, and the front end of a late-model Lincoln Mercury was totaled, almost beyond recognition.
Stanley has much more to brag about. His sub carries a three-and-a-half day supply of oxygen. The sub uses a carbon dioxide rebreather scrubber (using Soda Sorb) to remove the gas created as we breathed. In its totally enclosed environment, the air inside the sub at 700 feet remained the same - one atmosphere - as at the surface. The only pressure change came from the air compression caused by the drop in temperature as the sub went down to 700 feet deep. "Coming up from the depth is the same atmospheric change in terms of pressure as climbing a 150 foot high hill," Stanley reports. For divers, that means that you can still "dive" (in the sub) the day that you leave Roatan. You will not need to worry about absorbing more nitrogen, which would otherwise prevent you from flying if you were diving with a tank.
For $100, you can get the ride of your life to a depth only a few scientists have seen. More than likely given Stanley's genius, you'll come back up, too.
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