Last Project of the Semester: Underwater Submersible
Posted: Fri May 11, 2007 9:11 am
K. I mentioned this before, but here's the basics: We had to design a towable submersible that could house at least two transducers, and we had to do drafting style drawings, make a buck, then pack clay, then carve the clay, smooth it, cast it in plaster, and then use FRP, most people used fiberglass.
Here are some pics of the process:
Pretty rough. After about... oh... maybe another 5-8 hours, I was around here:
It still wasn't close. I probably have about 15-20 hours into trying to iron out all the bugs in the clay. It was fun. Luckily I had some booze to help numb the pain of such tedious work.
Oh, to carve clay, you need a rake. I made mine myself. It's a nice piece of walnut I turned on the wood lathe, then french polished with walnut shavings, and I made the rake itself outta diamondplate polished aluminum. Oh yeah.
After you have the clay where you want it, you cast it in plaster. I did something kinda funky with mine, I cast it with an overlap of about 1/8 of an inch. Why? Well, in one of the molds, I put a 1/8" piece of styrene all the way around, so hopefully, after I made my fiberglass pieces, they'd snap together, because of the lip. I also found some plastic just a bit thicker than the plastic I wanted to make fins out of, so I used clay to fiberglass a slot into the back of the form, allowing the real fin to fold into it... kinda hard to explain: Pic:
Here's a pic once I epoxied the fiberglass pieces together, with the dorsal fin just shoved into the slot. Oh yeah, the front of the piece is dark, because I decided to use carbon fiber.
No reason really, I just found some scraps and threw them in instead of fiberglass. The resin was too yellow to let me use it aesthetically though, so there wasn't really a point. I did learn how differnet it was to work with though. It's a lot stiffer. Anyway:
After about 2-3 coats of massively thick primer, a bit of bondo, spot putty, and one RUINED paintjob thanks to the compressor not turning back on to maintain pressure, then having to sand the whole thing back down and respraying it with white laquer, and a clear coat with some green pearl, it looked decent. The decals were designed by me, and printed onto testors decal paper with my inkjet printer. After the decal sheets dry you spray them with 'decal fixative'. Then you simply cut them out and apply them like any model car decal. It turned out pretty decent, I think:
Hope you guys enjoyed learning about the process.
Here are some pics of the process:
Pretty rough. After about... oh... maybe another 5-8 hours, I was around here:
It still wasn't close. I probably have about 15-20 hours into trying to iron out all the bugs in the clay. It was fun. Luckily I had some booze to help numb the pain of such tedious work.
Oh, to carve clay, you need a rake. I made mine myself. It's a nice piece of walnut I turned on the wood lathe, then french polished with walnut shavings, and I made the rake itself outta diamondplate polished aluminum. Oh yeah.
After you have the clay where you want it, you cast it in plaster. I did something kinda funky with mine, I cast it with an overlap of about 1/8 of an inch. Why? Well, in one of the molds, I put a 1/8" piece of styrene all the way around, so hopefully, after I made my fiberglass pieces, they'd snap together, because of the lip. I also found some plastic just a bit thicker than the plastic I wanted to make fins out of, so I used clay to fiberglass a slot into the back of the form, allowing the real fin to fold into it... kinda hard to explain: Pic:
Here's a pic once I epoxied the fiberglass pieces together, with the dorsal fin just shoved into the slot. Oh yeah, the front of the piece is dark, because I decided to use carbon fiber.
No reason really, I just found some scraps and threw them in instead of fiberglass. The resin was too yellow to let me use it aesthetically though, so there wasn't really a point. I did learn how differnet it was to work with though. It's a lot stiffer. Anyway:After about 2-3 coats of massively thick primer, a bit of bondo, spot putty, and one RUINED paintjob thanks to the compressor not turning back on to maintain pressure, then having to sand the whole thing back down and respraying it with white laquer, and a clear coat with some green pearl, it looked decent. The decals were designed by me, and printed onto testors decal paper with my inkjet printer. After the decal sheets dry you spray them with 'decal fixative'. Then you simply cut them out and apply them like any model car decal. It turned out pretty decent, I think:
Hope you guys enjoyed learning about the process.
