Effective Shackle for ROV Manipulator Operations:
Protecting the integrity of cabled seafloor observatories is essential to continued oceanographic operations. My aim this summer is to produce a tethering device that can be set and unset by ROV's manipulator arm using Solidworks 3-d software. In the fabrication of this "Shackle" I will be communicating with my mentor Larry Bird, the ROV pilots and mechanical engineers to develope constraints and requirements to further refine the device into a viable ROV friendly shackle for deep sea use.

This week:

Prototype finished! The Western Flyer is headed out manana, and I finished just in time to show the ROV pilots my shackle before they shove off for for a few weeks. My mentor Larry Bird helped me out big time since this week was a short one with getting my shackle desgin milled/assembled. I was stoked with the feed back that the pilots gave me on my design, and I will be submitting my drawings to the machine shop soon for the next fabricating phase.

Next week:

Get the Finished product started in the shop, so can start doing some load testing in a couple of weeks. I would also like to start my presentation/paper to get a good start on the final weeks of my internship.

Going well/ not well:

Only six weeks left for the internship! Where did the time go?