Submarines of Bruce Plazyk

I became a certified diver in 1968. My instructor was Ralph Erickson who was one of the founding members of PADI in 1967. He was working as a gym coach at my high school and was trying to get kids interested in scuba diving. Since my father had said that I couldn't build a sub until I was certified I went ahead with the program. After spending $75 for lessons and $327 for my complete set of diving gear I was ready to start building my first sub. Considering that I was making $2.15 per hour at my part-time job that dive gear was very expensive. When my son took his dive training I went through the course again with him. My fins, U.S. Divers Rocket Fins, which I still use, were older than everyone in the class including the instructor.

I built my first submarine, the copper colored one in the pictures in late 1968 and had it in a science fair at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. That sub eventually became a flower planter at my parents summer home in Wisconsin. There it served faithfully for many years.

My next sub was My Lady, shown in the photo with the RC bottles in a proposal we did for RC cola entitled "Going to sea, me and my RC". I built this sub in the living room of my parents summer home over the winter of 71. It got its name from the fact that my girlfriend at the time was mad that I was spending so much time building the boat that she gave me an ultimatum, her or the sub. I used this sub for a number of years at our summer home and even won the "Golden Hammer Award" from Mechanix Illustrated magazine. The sub now rests in a place of honor behind my shed.

I took a number of years off from sub building to get married and have a son and to work on other projects and businesses such as yacht repair, building custom dog houses, owning a machine job shop and most importantly helping my wife Dana launch her new business.

I followed the sub races with great interest since the original 1st ISR and then onto the WSI and now the HPS Series. Finally I was ready to get back into submarines.

For the 5th ISR I had started construction of Sand Shark, the yellow and black sub in the picture. I started building the sub the summer before the race. It was made with a material called c-flex and fiberglass cloth. Not lightweight but very strong. The only real problem I had with making it was my neighbors lack of appreciation for the bouquet of polyester resin on a summer afternoon. Unfortunately, I got laid off in January of the year of the race and had to withdraw due to lack of funding. At least I had most of the hull completed by this time.

When the 6th ISR rolled around I was going to be ready. Sand Shark was nearly complete and looked great in its new custom wetsuit skin with me in a suit to match. We made quite a pair. The day before we were to leave I decided to reroute some of the tubes for the drive mechanism through one of the tail frames. To make a clean hole I decided to use a 1/2" brad point drill bit. If you are not familiar with this type of bit it is primarily used for making holes for dowels. It has a very sharp point with cutting tips on the ends of the flutes to cut a clean accurate hole in wood. Not wanting to splinter the plywood when the drill passed through I held, with my hand, a block of wood on the far side while drilling. When the drill was passing through the wood its flutes caught in the wood and it rapidly came out the far side knocking the block out of my hand and imbedding itself about 1/2 " into the heel of my palm. It was not a clean nor accurate hole. The doctors in the emergency room had to crazy glue the pieces back in place since they were unable to stitch them. What I learned from this was that if you are bleeding a lot you move to the front of the line at the hospital, oh , and that drilling operation would have been a good application for use of a c-clamp. Anyway, no diving, no sub race. Well, as Chicago sports fans are used to saying, "there's always next year".

7th ISR, the third time is the charm. Martin was now old enough to dive and wanted to pilot the sub. During testing of Sand Shark we found that although the neoprene skin gave a nice smooth surface and looked really cool it preloaded the flexible tail requiring almost 30 pounds of pedal force just to flex the tail. This and the fact that my son's size 11 feet didn't fit in the area I had designed for my size 9's. Time to build another sub. We also felt that we needed to increase the vertical surface area of the new boat in order to reduce any recoil effect from the tail. Thus Faux Fish was born. I had seen videos from previous races where more often than not the non-propeller boats failed to move at all. I vowed that we would be ready to race with a fully tested and running boat. I would not be left wallowing on the starting line, absolutely no way! Unfortunately, due to other commitments, we were unable to start construction until about 6 weeks before the race. This boat was made with a foam core fiberglass shell. Although I was able to take some time off of work to work on the boat it still wasn't enough. We did finish the boat on the Monday the race started but never got to put it in the water before the race. Leaving Chicago for Washington we ran into major traffic problems, the trailer came loose from the car and we lost our hotel reservations in Washington. We made it to the race on Tuesday afternoon in spite of all and got set up and ready to run. The dry and wet safety inspections went fine on Wednesday. Thursday, we were ready to make a run when the pedal drive mechanism, a master/slave water cylinder arrangement developed an internal leak and was unable to work. We pulled the boat for repairs. Friday morning, Martin had to catch a flight back to Chicago because he and my wife were leaving for Europe that afternoon. I was on my own. Since I had not trained to pedal the sub and I wasn't sure if my knees or heart would give out first I had to get a volunteer to try a run with the sub. There was no shortage of volunteers so we finished the repairs from Thursday and finally, on Friday afternoon, the last day of the race, we were ready. The tail mechanism on the sub has a series of adjustable pneumatic springs to vary the stiffness of the tail. That these springs work is critical to the operation of the tail as without them the tail goes limp and the sub wallows, that is it wiggles left to right with no forward motion. Everyone had come to finally see the fish make its run and were cheering us on. While staging for our run I had the pilot try a full pressure application of force on the drive pedals. As the tail swept to the left a cloud of bubbles erupted from the regulator that controlled one set of springs and as the tail swept to the right the second regulator failed, doubling the release of bubbles. And the sub, (please pause for dramatic effect) wallowed. I was glad that we were underwater when this happened as it masked my facial expressions at what had just become one of the biggest disappointments of my life. We did receive a large round of applause as we pulled the boat from the water but it could not compensate for the failure. Unable to share my feelings with my wife and son who were on their way to Europe I packed up my toys and headed home. I found out the following week that we won First Prize for Innovation because even though it didn't work it was felt that it had the most potential. It was over a year before I worked on the boat again. What did I learn? Make sure the boat works before you go to the race. And also during the building of the sub I reconfirmed a lesson I learned from the 6th ISR when a large timber in my shop fell and hit my head requiring 9 staples, (in my head not the timber), the emergency room will see you fast if you are bleeding on their waiting room furniture. Staples, crazy glue, I could have done that myself.

For the 8th ISR we were going to try and take 2 subs, Faux Fish and Bogus Batoid. Faux Fish was going to be an updated version of the boat we took to the 7th ISR with improvements to the air spring system, which failed at the last race, and a new tail made from a modified monofin. We were taking the old airfoil shaped lunate tail to try if we had the time but we were sure that the monofin tail would work. During some full pressure testing of the pedal drive system about a week before the race we kept having problems with the water cylinder drive arrangement so we decided to eliminate it completely and go strictly with a mechanical push/pull system to drive the tail. The advantage of the original system was that it allowed the whole tail to steer left to right while maintaining oscillation. The mechanical system requires the pilot to pause while holding the tail in the left or right position for steering. We loose some speed in favor of reliability. In reviewing our previous attempts this seemed the prudent way to go. We didn't get Faux Fish into the water until two days before we were to leave for the race. We still didn't know if it would even work. Our test site was a quarry about 60 miles away. This would be our only chance to test the boat before the race. We got set up, did some basic trimming and it was finally time to see if the fish could swim. For safety sake we were positively buoyant and had no intention of completely submerging without any support divers. If it worked on the surface it would work underwater. My son climbed in and started pedalling but the sub didn't move. Only the tail swished back and forth. It was not a looking good. I increased the pressure to the air springs in the tail and Martin pedalled again. This time the sub moved forward, but verrrry slowly. He also mentioned that there was hardly any resistance in the pedals. Well if a little increase in air pressure was good a lot must be a lot better. I cranked the regulators up near maximum pressure and he tried again. Now he felt some resistance as the air springs worked to control deflection of the tail as it swept to the side. And the boat lurched forward. A few more strokes of the pedals and the boat was moving and gaining speed. Soon I was barely able to keep up with it. To say we were elated would be a gross understatement. Finally the years of work were showing a payback. There had been some concern about recoil from the tail affecting straight line stability but this was not the case. During the initial movement phase the nose of the sub swept through an arc about 12"

wide, but as speed increased the movement was stabilized by the shape of the hull. We played around for about an hour until it got dark and headed home. We were going to the races. At the races we had a couple of good runs and a couple of bad runs but we made it down the course and that's all that mattered. It was an experience neither of us will ever forget.

Back to Bogus Batoid. When I decided to to build a sub modeled after a ray my first decision was to go with either an undulating or oscillating drive system for the wings. Being as the sub had to be human-powered all of the easy ways of making the wings move fell by the wayside. What was left was a number of different drive mechanisms, all of which would make Rube Goldberg proud. Not that I don't mind giving Rube a run for his money sometimes, the drive losses in the undulating drive design were significant, almost to the point of requiring a two-man boat, one pedaling strictly to counter drive losses and the other to provide forward motion. This would now be a larger, more expensive, harder to transport etc. boat. Not the way to go. My other choice, oscillating wings, seemed much easier by comparison. With this design I only have to make the wings flap up and down while varying the angle of attack of the leading edge of the wing. That's all. Oh, and ideally you want the wing flapping to be independent for steering purposes and be able to vary the pitch angle of the whole drive to give some dive and climb capabilities. Still a much simpler system than generating a variable traveling wave in a flexible wing. The next problem was packaging the drive and driver. Scaling up an eagle or cownose ray to man-carrying size gives about a 14-15 foot wingspan for a 10 foot long sub. This was a problem as the launch elevator at Carderock is only 7 feet wide. Those propeller subs were looking better all of the time. Back to the drawing board. I felt that we could get away with an 8 foot wingspan, wings to be in the raised position for launching, because the surface area of the wings would still be sizable. So I got the design completed and was ready to begin construction. Since I was already on the way to building one of the most complicated subs at the race what else could could I do? Cedar strip construction filled the bill. After spending nearly 300 hours hand fitting over 500 individual cedar strip pieces the hull was nearly done. Unfortunately, since the hull took so long to build I did not have enough time available to finish and have both boats available for the race. We felt that it was better to have 1 working boat than 2 non-working so Bogus Batoid went on the shelf. I did include some pictures so you can see what has gone into it so far.

For the 9th ISR we plan to take two boats, Bogus Batoid and Faux Fish II which is currently on the drawing board. Maybe it is an obsession.

Future projects may be an amphibious wet-sub with a diesel engine for land and surface use and a cargo bay, sort of an underwater pick-up truck. If they ever move the sub races back to the ocean I will have to build one of these to launch the racing sub through the surf. Another project is a non-powered one-man dry sub which will use variable buoyancy and glider wings like some of the oceanographic research vessels for forward movement. The plan is to cross Lake Michigan by gliding up and down.