How to build a submarine and survive [video] | Hacker News Reader

How to build a submarine and survive [video]

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134 pointspelim39 comments

It reminds me of an obsession I had when I was young (maybe 12 or 13) where I kept iterating on a design for a mini-sub I had hoped to build. I must have checked out books on the history of the submarine about that time and became obsessed with the simplicity of the original Turtle submarine — operated with hand screws (propellers).

Likely too I saw a homemade sub or scuba tow on the odd Popular Mechanics cover....

I had read enough to incorporate a lead ballast that could be released from inside the sub. I imagined props and motors based around those electric trolling motors you can get for a small fishing boat. I therefore incorporated a car battery into the design. Front and rear ballast tanks allowed me to control the pitch trim. I imagined a small electric automotive tire pump would suffice to force the water out of the ballast tanks.

I obsessed over a mechanism to allow each trolling motor to be gimbaled from a pair of joysticks in the sub. I built mechanical models with paper drinking straws and toilet paper rolls to test the mechanics.

I played with different seating configurations to minimize the size of the sub but keep it "operatable".

It was a weird and impossible fantasy that never had a chance of moving beyond the drawing board stage. You know, especially for a kid with a single mother who was a secretary. But perhaps there was some intellectual and creative stimulation that I was feeding off at the time that made the effort worth it.

Thinking about it now though, how obsessive I was, it might also have spoke to a boredom, isolation and maybe sadness I felt at the time. The sub might have been an escape for me.

To see someone build a sub for real is kind of cool. But it also makes clear how likely my design would have just collapsed right away at about 10 feet depth. I mean, I planned on using plywood for the hull, ha ha.

I had very similar flights of fancy as well. Some combination of low-tech, soapbox-derby materials and a wild idea that I could build a raft out of 2x4s and cross the lake! Or make a parachute out of a pillowcase! Or put wings on my bike and fly!

I’d doodle designs and look at piles of junk, imagining what I could do with the materials.

I think the appeal was partly that the proper materials were way out of reach for me, and if my terrible idea failed, it was just made out of everyday stuff anyway.

Hopelessly impractical and (as you say) a bit obsessive.

Man, I went through the same thing with dirigibles when I was a kid. Never gonna be able to afford a blimp hangar though...

> I mean, I planned on using plywood for the hull, ha ha.

https://www.svseeker.com/argonaut-jr-building-and-diving-a-w... (“Argonaut Jr – Building and Diving a Wooden Submarine from 1894”)

Both the replica and the original are totally amazing! I expected something impractical.

Very cool, had not seen. I am that guy!

Plywood sounds great! It is used in boat Buildng all the time.(aircraft also) By bending very thin(1/8” for example), you can add by gluing, and or nailing each later on top, which will hold the original bent shape. Plywood itself is strong, because of it's intrinsic layers, and adding more layers on top, makes it extremely strong. Making the bow and Stern, fit and be as tight and strong - that's another problem. Maybe you should get back to the drawing board, and continue. Sounds like a great project.

Oh man, that's great! For me it was a go-kart. They were illegal where I lived (Chicago suburbs), but whatever.

There were two big hurdles for a kid: acquisition of a side-shaft motor (lawn mower engines' shafts were vertical, so no dice) and acquisition of a clutch. I couldn't afford either of those. Nor could I weld.

My friend and neighbor, as it turns out, inexplicably had a snow-blower engine in his garage. Horizontal shaft, perfect! But I still couldn't get a clutch.

So I decided who needs to start or stop in a sane manner? I'd simply attach a bicycle wheel directly to the shaft of the engine, and use lawn-mower wheels for the other three.

Then I set about to build the frame, by hacksawing an old angle-iron bed frame apart and bolting it into a rectangle. I managed to cut the metal, but drilling holes in it for bolts proved to be essentially impossible.

So I built a crude platform out of wood and attached the wheels to it. The front wheels were bolted onto the ends of a board that I could pivot with my feet. Then I bolted the engine onto the back, with wood shims to make the bicycle wheel meet the ground at the same height as the three other wheels.

There were no brakes and no way to totally stop the engine. I propped the back up on some bricks and went to start it... and the pull-start mechanism broke. Probably saved me from serious injury or worse.

And that was that.

To be fair, I raced 2-stroke karts for years, and up until relatively recently, clutches weren't a thing. Most karts were direct-drive, as you didn't want lag and power loss, and simplicity was usually more important than anything else for weight and general sanity. The engine was more likely to stall when you didn't want it to than go when it shouldn't - if you spun in a race, that was it, race over.

That said, the rest of your kart sounds like it was probably best avoided - you should be grateful for that pull-start breakage, yes!

the one time i went out on an open wheel shifter kart i recall bump starting it and power shifting, but indeed no clutch.

Interesting! This was long before the Internet, so all I had to go on was books I checked out from the library about how to build stuff. They presented the clutch as a basic component.

The other topic I repeatedly checked books out on was movie special effects. Of course I wanted to make "laser beams" in my Super-8 movies. This, not surprisingly, was even less practical than a go-kart because it required an optical printer. Books offered the idea of drawing on or scratching the film as an alternative, but even as a kid I rejected that as utterly impractical and lame on a tiny 8mm frame.

I did make a bunch of movies, and do and build cool stuff as a kid. I wonder how much more I would have accomplished with access to all the info and 3-D printers and video capability kids have today. Would I do more because of all that, or less because of the massive distraction of the media now?

That last question is one I think about often! It sounds like your childhood was pretty well spent. I wanted to make lasers too - just not on film! I built most of one, but only lacked a decently sized ruby, for some reason. Probably just as well, as my childhood electronics would almost certainly have been at least as lethal as your kart...

To an eyeball or two, at least!

> It reminds me of an obsession I had when I was young (maybe 12 or 13) where I kept iterating on a design for a mini-sub I had hoped to build.

I don’t know when that was, but nowadays it is feasible, for a kid [0]. Not sure how deep it can go though.

[0]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=KLEH8RJsYgI

When I was 7, with a bunch of friends, I built a 'plane' in our attic. We went all over the globe with it looking for treasure ;) It's funny because until your comment I had totally forgotten about it but now I remember the cables that moved the ailerons, and the two old car seats for pilot and co-pilot (or passenger...). Some magazine (Panorama?) had printed a treasure map and even though the magazine itself was strictly off limits to us the father of one of my friends had donated the map to our cause which we kept as our most precious secret.

Yes but what an amazing 10-foot journey that would have been!

Thanks for sharing, your story is great : - )

It turns out the John Mayer of all people wrote a (imho) really beautiful song about a man building a homemade submarine in his basement, called "Walt Grace's Submarine Test, January 1967". If you feel like taking a listen, it might stir up some memories; I know that I usually connect with it more after a weekend of getting lost in a passion project.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrcMMyNeJJs

Similarly, Resistor recorded a good progressive rock album called To The Stars, about a boy who builds a rocket ship in his backyard.

https://resistor222.bandcamp.com/album/to-the-stars

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fm6WMMgmMpM

>I planned on using plywood for the hull

Reminds me of the guys that entered a robot with MDF 'armour' for Robot Wars. You can imagine how well that went! ;0)

If you can't imagine it, see: https://robotwars.fandom.com/wiki/Overdozer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=395VuP374HE (BTW I wouldn't call them 'idiots'. Kudos to them for having a go.)

Not a homemade submarine story but very much related.

When my dad was a teenager he saw a film by Jacques Cousteau, one of the coinventors of the first aqualung and became obsessed with the idea. He lived on a smallholding and had been taught to be self-reliant, so by borrowing his dad’s welding gear he made himself a home-made aqualung. But how to test it?

On the smallholding there was a water reservoir that was deep enough but when he tried it of course he had positive buoyancy so kept floating to the surface. Normal divers have a weight belt, but my dad decided to chain himself to a heavy wooden railway sleeper and just throw it in. So there he was, dragged to the bottom of the reservoir, chained to a railway sleeper with a semi-functioning home-made underwater breathing apparatus.

He must have escaped somehow but when he told the story he would just leave that part a mystery and he’s dead now so there’s no way of finding out.

What an absolutely awesome story.

Oh god, the "just throw it in" part. I'd have at least swam in and slowly pulled at a rope tied to the sleeper so I sank, sounds like your dad really made sure he bet his life on his device.

That sentence alone = dad is killing himself

When I worked for the Navy, we hosted a human-powered submarine race in one of the model basins where we normally tested new ship designs. Anyone could enter but it was mostly university engineering teams. It was great fun to see the homemade designs people came up with and built (and were willing to dive in!) - there some good ones but also some hilariously bad ones. A submarine that can be steered accurately under propulsion is harder to build than a lot of people realize. The most common failure arose from the assumption that a submarine will stay “upright,” forgetting that it can roll in the water (and will unless there is some control surface or ballast preventing it). Thankfully, it was a controlled environment with Navy divers on hand, so we didn’t lose anyone, but a few had to be pulled out.

Sounds cool. Where was that?

Step 1: Build the submarine

Step 2: Don't go in the submarine

ROVs and AUVs indeed have the distinct benefit of not killing you when they implode.

So many different ways to die in a submarine, so many failure modes. It's one thing to solve all the engineering problems you can identify. It's another to learn from all the failure modes everyone else has encountered.

Step 3: if you do go in the submarine, don't go in a submarine built by a maverick billionaire/millionaire. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Kim_Wall / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_submersible_implosion

If you do find yourself in a situation where you are forced to ride in a billionaire's submarine, just make sure it's the billionaire who is fanatically obsessed with deep sea exploration...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepsea_Challenger

I went to college with a guy who said he was going to build a submarine. I thought it was a bit out there, but he was a driven guy.

40 years later I had a random call from his brother and asked about his sub dream. Turns out he not only built one, he built an entire company and his company has been building the SportSub for over 30 years now. Several hundred of them exist.

https://sportsub.com/

If I had 93000 USD laying around I might get one too.

Never stop dreaming.

I love the live translation for this talk, and others. Great work from C3 organizers.

Amazing detailed talk. Watched it with my dad, and we both loved the story telling and details. I do applaud the effort of building a pool to test the sub, when it was to far to the water.

When submarines were new, people were afraid to get in, and rightly so!

I enjoyed Kaj Leers “A History of Submarines” (1) podcast. Like a series of history lectures, each episode builds on the last.

I also recommend one of Kaj's sources, “The Submarine in War and Peace: Its Development and its Possibilities” (2). American inventor Simon Lake gives a first-hand account of early submarine development in America. The book's full of illustrations and stories of close calls.

1: https://open.spotify.com/show/27TmgN8qtNdLsP1ns9xrfr or https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a-history-of-submarine...

2: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/46382

P.S. Subnautica is what sparked my interest in submarines and remains the most immersive underwater survival-exploration game I’ve played.

Awesome to see this; hope they don't go to see the Titanic.

Reminds me of that deranged Danish murderer that built a submarine for undisturbed murder sessions :S sadly his victim did not survive that

Thanks for the pointer to this fantastic talk. The excitement, thoroughness and dedication they put into this project along with their entertaining presentation is wonderful.

Is there a way to mute the speaker while the translation audio is playing? I'm hearing both voices simultaneously, is that intended?

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