Buoy for Deep diving

[whucash]

Originally Posted by Kars

Hi Whucash,

My friend used two big strong expensive buoys made in Germany, costing already E 90,- a piece. Than he used big HQ pulleys, stainless steel snap shackle, SS bolds to hold the aluminium beams together. The 60m rope was also HQ, ~E 1,80 / M. I'm sure one could make it a lot cheaper using different buoys, pulleys, rope.

The 1/10 of the plates' depth question.
Well you don't want to have the weight falling down getting entangled in the dive line, nor you want the weight crashing on the diver or safety diver. There for the length of your beam separating the dive line from the weight line should have a reasonable distance. I think 3m should be the minimum, sufficient to depths to 30m. Diving 10m deeper I would recommend adding 1 meter to the beam to become 4m long. Depth/ 10 = length of seperation beam, 50m /10 = 5m beam. It's also dependent on the amount of current, and in a small way to the amount of weight used.

Also at the end of the dive line it's better to have a small CONE like 'plate'*, white tennis balls, hockey ball?, to avoid it swivelling to the side when pulled up. For the weight I recommend a rounder droplet like shape, avoiding splitting headache to a diver when he does get the weight on head.

Positioning the whole system in a good angle to the current is another thing to keep in mind, as well as varying current directions at different depths.

Love, Courage and water,

Kars

*cone could be made of a big paint lit.

The stainless steel is a very expensive material even used for small parts..when i read your description i start to understand why ours was cheaper..the pulleys are wheels without the robber on them so made from normal steel this is the worse element..plus the buoys..one is in the price of ours pontoon and the line as i mentioned before is the cheapest one in the whole shop and we will change it for the summer..
As for the other details we used the best materials as we could..so the aluminium is a good quality and the shackles are the best we couls find beacuse they have to be so..

As for the beam our is a bit different..the weight is placed on a small wheel between the reel and the part of rope that is connected to the aluminium construction so that when a diver is pulled out..the line on which the weight hangs is twice shorter than the diving line and it goes 2 times slower than the diving line and because of this it doesn't float in different dimentions.. It sounds complicated but it is much easier to understand what i have ritten when you see a picture or a drawing..i'll try to add somenthing to show what i mean..

As for the plate..at the beggining we used normal aluminium plate but when going up it was floating all over the place, slowing down the pulling-up opertion..then we changed to a plastic plate with a lot of holes in it and a 1kg weight connected to it..thanks to the holes it stays in one line and because of the weight it isn't pulled anywhere..

We are diving on lakes co teher isn't almost any current expect when wind is blowing but it happens rarely and normally the rain is falling so we do not dive in such conditions..

And we made a few tets before connecting a living creature to the machine..we pulled up a dumy from 30m wihout any problem..and one of us from 25m without any problems..at the beginning the beam was a concern but after a few pullings there wasn't any danger taht the weight will "touch you a bit harder tahn expected"

I have to make some closer photos of our counter weight to show how exaclty it looks like.

[Jouskari]

Great system whucash...

We also have the same problems of poor visibility making dives unsafe without proper safety systems. Please post more pics if only possible. I´m already designing a similar system for our diveteam.