Home Built Pedal Powered Submarine

Discussion in 'Powerboats' started by rwatson, Oct 24, 2012.

  1. rwatson
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    rwatson Senior Member

    .... eventually converted to power after a long peddling trip.

    What a persistent guy - only took him 30 years

     
  2. Petros
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    Petros Senior Member

    looks like his persistence lasted longer than the old Soviet Union. If he lived in the west he could have bought one in much less time. Of course, that is no fun.

    strange when the KGB caught him with it they sent him to the Soviet Naval Architect school. A form of "re-eduction", to teach him why no one builds one man subs. Perhaps it was a good thing the Wright Brothers were not formally educated.
     
  3. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    Mikhail Puchkov is very lucky he wasn't shot by the KGB. Kudos to him.
     
  4. thudpucker
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    thudpucker Senior Member

    Back in the 50's (I think) one of the unlimited Hydroplane racers was stuck on the Communist side of the Berlin wall.
    He built a one man plane and flew it up over the wall to freedom.
     
  5. Petros
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    Petros Senior Member

    and there was the family that built a hot air balloon from raincoats, the husband was an aerospace engineer and the wife worked in a raincoat factory. they floated across to west germany on a moonless night.
     
  6. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

  7. daiquiri
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    daiquiri Engineering and Design

    Great and inspiring story about one man's force of will. :)

    I get your point. ;) If we also consider that there wes no internet back then, and very few available literature about submarine design and construction, a nearly heroic picture of this guy's feat comes out.

    I consider the fact that the State rewarded him by giving him a free formal training in a naval architecture university is, imho, a really nice thing. Evidently, not everything was so rotten in the former Soviet Union.
     
  8. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    That was the "new and improved" Soviet Union, not the "former" one.
     
  9. daiquiri
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    daiquiri Engineering and Design

    In modern terms - Soviet Union Ver. 2.0 :)

    I do not have enough info to judge the USSR state system, especially in the last decade or so of it's existence. But I believe it was not just grim or evil (you know some "all-good" country?), or else it wouldn't give us so many brilliant scientific minds in nearly every field. Free education at all levels and free medical care, for example, were a sign of great civility. Gulags, of course, were exactly the opposite. So it was a system with it's big contradictions, I'd say.

    Perhaps Alik could be a guy who knows something about it, from his or his parents' first-hand experience...?
     
    Last edited: Oct 26, 2012
  10. michael pierzga
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    michael pierzga Senior Member

    Looks like the Baltic Sailing Club in St Petersburg. In Soviet times it was full of sailors building fast elegant boats out of whatever materials they could scavenge. Walking around the club in the early 1980's was a real eye opener. Plenty of clever, talented, Russian small craft builders.
     
  11. thudpucker
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    thudpucker Senior Member

  12. daiquiri
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    daiquiri Engineering and Design

  13. thudpucker
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    thudpucker Senior Member

    LOL, I think hes got a really classy Sunday-go-to-meeting inflatable vest or survival suit.

    There must be a Propeller or Rotating screw to make it go.
    what about raising and lowering. Diving planes to go down, but that requires more Propeller action. I think that thing would take a lot of calories to operate in that first level of 0-30 feet of operation.
    I'd get pretty chilly after an hour down there.
     
  14. hoytedow
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    hoytedow Carbon Based Life Form

    It looks like the table cloth from an American-Italian restaurant. :D
     

  15. michael pierzga
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    michael pierzga Senior Member

    Innovative double skin Russian sub. Amateur built in 1721....not stitch and glue....with trailing snorkel.
     

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