Saved From the Scrap Heap
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LEFT FOR DEAD The Ben Franklin damaged beyond repair in 1970 when it broke from it's mooring and struck a reef. |
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SCRAPED AND STRIPPED Staff and volunteers at the Vancouver Museum have returned the Ben Franklin to it's original conditon. |
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REPAINTED White with yellow trim were the original colours used when the Ben Franklin was built in the 1960s. |
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ON PUBLIC DISPLAY The refirbished Ben Franklin was scheduled to be on display in Vancouver by the end of 2002. |
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Vancouver museum refurbishes Ben Franklin submersible used to study the Gulf Stream. By Dean
Jobb
Nickel magazine, October 2002 -- "Vessels large may venture more, but little boats should keep near
shore," Benjamin Franklin (1706-90) once observed in his Poor Richard's Almanac, and while the
14.5-metre-long submersible named for the American statesmen and inventor hardly rates as a little boat, it
has not ventured from shore in more than three decades.
The 130-tonne sub, with a hull formed from thick plates of high-strength steel, completed the first major underwater survey of the Gulf Stream in 1969 but has spent most of its life dismantled and relegated to a corner of a North Vancouver shipyard in British Columbia, Canada. It was in danger of being scrapped when the Vancouver Maritime Museum took on the task of refurbishing it for display.
"I know submersibles, and the thought of acquiring the sub just seemed like a pipe dream," says James Delgado, the museum's executive director, who was offered the Ben Franklin in December 1999. "I did't need eight hours, which is what I was given to make a decision."
Built in Switzerland in the late 1960s, the submersible was purchased by businessman John Horton and shipped to Vancouver in 1971. While Horton's plan to modify the vessel for commercial work off the British Columbia coast never materialized, he donated the $15,000 needed to haul it by truck and barge to the museum site.
"It was still in good shape," reports Delgado, an underwater archaeologist. "There was some mild corrosion where the vessel had been resting on a wooden pallet for thirty years. That cleaned up beautifully. There was no rust, just peeling paint and moss growth, that kind of thing." The interior also suffered little corrosion even though about 10 tonnes of rainwater had accumulated through an open hatch. "It took us a year to dry," he notes.
Ben Franklin's hull is fashioned from plates of 3.5-centimetre-thick steel capable of withstanding pressures at depths of up to 600 metres. The submarine division of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp. of Bethpage, New York, U.S.A., teamed up with deep-ocean explorer Jacques Piccard to commission the vessel from the Swiss firm Giovanola Brothers (now Giovanola Technologies).
The cylindrical hull, with an outside diameter of 3.1 metres, was built of welded sections of Aldur 55/68D, a high-strength steel alloy made by the Austrian firm Voest, containing 1.6% manganese. Each end is capped with rounded hemispheres formed from six welded plates of Welmonil, a hardenable steel produced by Hoag of Germany with a nickel content of between 0.8 and 1.8%. When the submersible was built in the 1960s, Welmonil did not have grade numbers for its alloys, but this alloy would now be designated as Welmonil 43. Both alloys can withstand pressures exceeding 48 megapascals.
The sub was christened in honour of Franklin, who studied the Gulf Stream during Atlantic crossings in the late 1700s. With Piccard and five other researchers aboard, it left Florida and remained submerged in the Gulf Stream for more than 30 days, drifting with the current 2,700 kilometres before surfacing off Nova Scotia. Operating at an average depth of 200 metres, the crew took detailed measurements of temperature, velocity and salinity, and descended to 540 metres to study the ocean bottom. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States installed cameras to record the crew's physical and psychological adjustment to a long period in a closed environment, and these data have been used to plan space missions.
The Ben Franklin was used to study underwater geology and the impact of industrial waste dumped off the U.S. eastern seaboard, but its career was short. Damaged in 1970 after breaking free of its mooring and running aground on a reef, the sub was disassembled for shipment to Vancouver the following year.
Staff and volunteers at the Vancouver Maritime Museum invested two years and $60,000 in donated materials to reassemble and restore the vessel. The hull has been scraped, stripped, and returned to its original gleaming white with yellow trim, and the submersible should be on public display by the end of 2002.
Dean Jobb is a freelance writer and lectures in journalism at Kings College in Halifax,
N.S.
 Vancouver Maritime Museum 1905 Ogden Ave., Vancouver, British Columbia Canada V6J 1A3 Phone: 1 604 257 8300 Fax: 1 604 737 2621 E-mail: genvmm@vmm.bc.ca Website: www.vmm.bc.ca/home.htm |
