Homemade Diving Apparatus

Step 5 Ballast

You'll probably need about 25 pounds of ballast to get the helmet to sink. Old U.S. Army ammunition boxes filled with rocks work great, but failing that, use your ingenuity. Test to ensure that your buoyancy is right, and you can ascend and descend with ease. Ballast could be attached directly to the helmet itself, or hung on a chain or rope, as I did. 19th century divers used cast metal helmets, contributing some weight, and also wore weighted boots and large weights around their necks, one at the front, one at the back, contributing weight (see image). Anything heavy would work; I used rocks, but old metal junk, bricks, cast- iron pots, etc., would probably all work if you had enough of them. Make sure you have a rope tied to the ballast to allow you to haul it out of the water, or pull up the diver in an emergency.

Comments

[techno guy]

I made my own equation for finding the weight in ponds of the ballast.

ballast (lbs)=(capacity in gallons of inner helmet * 8) + (-weight of helmet+5lbs)

[snowluck2345]

just wanted to point out its not realy "your equation", many people have probably created it before you.

[techno guy]

Since the helmet has like 5 galons capacity, I calculated that the weight would have to be 44.5 lbs.