Sub-Human: A "Garage-Built" Approach To A Competitive Human-Powered Submarine

Abstract

What started out as fanciful talk during work, tumed into a concerted effort to design, build, and race a human-powered submarine in the First Annual htemational Submarine Races held in West Palm Beach, Florida in June of 1989. The SubHuman Project began as a couple of engineers discussing their own ideas of how to design a human-powered submarine after leaming of the contest in May of 1988. With little money and no facilities, the project evolved into a dedicated group of engineers and others working on their own time without corporate, govemment, or industry backing to design arid build the human-powered submarine Sub-Human. Some of the overriding factors influencing the design included a very minimal budget, and that much of the fabrication be done in the family garage by the group members themselves. Throughout the design process the TLAR (That Looks About Right) method was used extensively due to the limited amount of time available for research, detail designing, and testing.