For sale: A homemade submarine, as is. Needs work before submerging.
A B.C. resident has listed the unique project online, stating it’s a two-man submarine that’s over 17 feet in length.
And Tim Birmingham of Cawston is asking a unique price: $94,000.
As do-it-yourself projects go, the one-atmosphere submarine is a rarity, to say the least.
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Birmingham’s father, Thomas Birmingham, began building the small sub in Nanoose Bay.
He said his father had a friend, Al Trice, who helped create the Pisces sub — designed and engineered by International Hydrodynamics in North Vancouver.
“We started building it in the 1970s,” Tim Birmingham said of the now-for-sale sub, adding his dad was a mariner and that he wanted to do salvage work with it.
“To get boom boats out of Georgia Straight; they used to lose a lot of them.”
Birmingham says his dad leaned heavily on Trice’s designs when it came to building the sub.
“This one is made of polyester resin and fibreglass,” Birmingham said of the submarine’s construction.
The sub’s hull is half-an-inch to three-quarters of an inch thick across most of the body.
However, the submarine cockpit is two-and-a-half inches thick.
The father-and-son team spent 13 years constructing the sub. While the fibreglass work is done, it still needs a lot of finishing touches to be functional.
“I had it for quite a while and kept working on it,” said Birmingham. “It’s the kind of project that needs more than one person to complete.”
Birmingham was just 14 when work on the sub started. He’s now 65 and has decided that it’s time for someone else to see the project through to completion.
Emotionally, he said it was a tough decision, but it came down to one thing: “I’d like to see somebody finish it.”
According to Birmingham, the best buyer would be a marine engineer, familiar with submarine diving dynamics and propulsion.
Failing that, they should have quite a bit of nautical knowledge, as well as time and money, in order to finish the sub before taking it for a test dive.
“Six months to year, I would think,” Birmingham said of how long he thinks it would take to finish.
The sub comes with plenty of parts that need installing, but not everything.
‘They might need about $15,000 I would guess,” Birmingham speculated on what it would cost to finish it.
Regarding a potential buyer, Birmingham says one person in Seattle has expressed interest.
But whoever buys it, moving it will be their responsibility — and the sub weighs one ton.
Birmingham hopes whoever buys it will complete it and use it for some scientific purpose — two items that would please him and his late father.
‘I’d be sadder not to see it finished,” said Birmingham. “I really would.”
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