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Steven Irving <sirving@fr*.sc*.fs*.ed*> wrote:- > Did I understand you to say that you, or ones in your group, had made their > own *drysuits*. I'd be interested in hearing how and what you used to seam > them together. Also how well did they remain dry. Thanks Steve The group that I was in, made their own wetsuits. I once read a 1960's home handyman's magazine article "how to make a drysuit". It was 2-piece like an old frogman suit. It was made by rubberizing a pullover and a long underpant with a sort of rubber solution (dissolved in ammonia, I think). The seals had to be bought as seals. Nothing about an inflater, I think; drysuit squeeze was a fact of life. (And divers' lifejackets were unheard of.) I have a photocopy of a 1950's home handyman's magazine article "How to make an aqualung". The parts are: ex-RAF pilot's oxygen cylinder; blowtorch-type first stage valve; bottled butane (Calor gas) regulator (which were bigger than present day Calor gas valves); rubber breathing tubing from a medical suppliers; mouthpiece off a snorkel; etc. No pressure gauge or reserve. In most home-made aqualungs (common in UK before shop aqualungs were affordable) the Calor valve was fastened to the blowtorch valve behind the diver's neck on top of the cylinder; but the article's set was an odd precursor of the modern single-hose set: the Calor valve was in the diver's chest linked to the blowtorch valve by intermediate pressure tubing; the Calor valve was connected to the mouthpiece by the usual two wide corrugated breathing tubes. The Calor valve's spring had to be replaced to reduce the desired output flow pressure to zero; and big holes had to be made in the `wet' side's casing to let the water pressure in and out easily. In those old sets it was easy to beat the regulator, and thus aqualungers were taught to breathe slowly and steadily. Some diving gear of that time was even cruder: (1) after the initial postwar rush of war-surplus frogman's fins dried up, some sport divers had to make fins by gluing marine ply to plimsoles; (2) some home-made breathing sets were constant-flow, and some of those had a breathing (not rebreathing) bag to catch the air flow until the diver needed it; (3) some home-made sets used a wartime gasmask as a fullface mask, as if even diving masks weren't to be had. And many oxygen rebreathers (frogman's, industrial, home-made) were used for early sport diving. The BSAC may talk harshly of rebreathers; but if it wasn't for rebreathers, likely early UK organized sport diving wouldn't have pulled through until men found how to make aqualung regulators from Calor gas valves. No. In Britain it wasn't like in USA and France where the aqualung makers responded fast and massively as soon as a magazine article and a film about Cousteau set off a big public demand for scuba gear. The UK diving gear makers (Siebe Gorman) kept aqualungs very expensive, perhaps hoping that "those odd groups of people wanting to play at frogmen" would fade like some ordinary craze; but it lasted until the homemakes appeared, and then at last someone designed round the Custeau-Gagnan patent and in Hexham (Northumberland, England) set up Submarine Products Ltd. to make aqualungs (which he called "breathing sets", for "aqualung" was still a trade name, although in Britain it has become an ordinary word after much unsupervised use in material written by sport divers and their clubs). Then the dike was down, and Siebe Gorman had to advertise to the sport diving market. And we still have sport diving. Luckily Britain got away without laws restricting or putting officials over all diving. The only thing of that sort that happened early was that an ex-commando frogman started a commercial work diving firm using war-surplus frogman's kit, and in reply to that a law was passed saying that rebreathers couldn't be used in commercial diving. Only that, luckily, before there were enough sport divers in Britain to be a pressure group to resist such things.
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