Northeast Working Equipment Group
D-Day 1998 Working Equipment Rally
Page 3 -- The Bubble Helmet
Willow Springs Quarry - Richland, Pennsylvania
A FEW WEEKS AGO a friend e-mailed Jim Boyd the address of a website and said, "Take a look at this!" The website belonged to Discount Divers Supply in Seattle, Washington, and it contained a photo of "Bill's Bubble," a home-made diving helmet with a polycarbonate sphere and fabricated breastplate, complete with a Harvey's neckdam and exhaust valve. A phone call and credit card transaction had the helmet in Jim's hands in a few days. The helmet had been built by diver Bill Gordon in 1994 and tested for 45 minutes in 15 feet of water on a scuba regulator. Jim closed the regulator port and replaced it with a fitting for a surface supply whip off an air control valve.
As Billy Locke discovered (above, assisted by Ray Tucker) on the first test dive using only the Miller weightbelt, the bubble helmet requires a full MkV 84-pound weightbelt to keep it down. Its unrestricted visibility made it a lot of fun to dive (we kept it to the level above the cliff, however). It did have one unique characteristic: Unless you had a heavy air flow, the hat tended to fog up inside as soon as it hit the warm surface air -- as both Billy Locke and Greg Platt (top) demonstrated, Greg alongside Bob Rusnak in the Butler's Mk12. It gave the distinct impression of a giant GE SoftWhite lightbulb emerging from the water! Tom Butts (below) dived the bubble over his black military Viking drysuit.
THE TWO TIMS -- Tranter from Atlanta (left) and Berger from Schuylkill Haven dived the bubble, along with Jim Boyd(below) and others. Greg Platt struck a heroic pose upon returning to the dock (bottom).
THE WARNING on the Discount Divers' website said that the bubble hat should be used only by "serious" divers.
With all the silliness that hat generated, "serious" was hardly the right word for it!
