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.
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.
That said, the rest of your kart sounds like it was probably best avoided - you should be grateful for that pull-start breakage, yes!
https://www.svseeker.com/argonaut-jr-building-and-diving-a-w... (“Argonaut Jr – Building and Diving a Wooden Submarine from 1894”)
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.
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.)
I don’t know when that was, but nowadays it is feasible, for a kid [0]. Not sure how deep it can go though.
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.
Step 2: Don't go in the submarine
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.
If I had 93000 USD laying around I might get one too.
Never stop dreaming.
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.
