How to test an underwater shooting box at home

A few years ago, I got into div­ing. Since I am such an ama­teur pho­tog­ra­ph­er that I pho­to­graph extreme­ly rarely, all my under­wa­ter pho­tog­ra­phy was reduced to advice to friends on which cam­era to choose, and then click it a cou­ple of times under water. Of course, almost the best pho­tos came out by acci­dent, and the best ones didn’t come out at all, because at that moment there was no cam­era at hand. And at some point I want­ed to indulge in some­thing small and cheap. Of course, there was no talk of any GoPro, since this tru­ly video blog­ging cam­era, of course, is cool in all sorts of extreme con­di­tions on pro­mo videos, but in real­i­ty it gives a rather dull spec­ta­cle under­wa­ter, which a nor­mal per­son is then sim­ply not able to watch (shak­ing, blue and oth­er delights of cheap under­wa­ter pho­tog­ra­phy). There­fore, the choice fell on the Chi­nese non­ame for

Then she walked for some time, then lay for a long time and wait­ed for the trip, but still she wait­ed. Of course, the first test is car­ried out with­out a cam­era. It is nec­es­sary to check if the box holds pres­sure (even GoPros tend to leak peri­od­i­cal­ly). I was very sor­ry that the bot­tom is at 10 meters, since the box is designed for 30 meters, and I would like to check it for sure. How­ev­er, 10 meters was enough. He, of course, did not explode, but he took in about 5 ml of water, which may well be enough for a small cham­ber to drown. After that, he was thrown into a suit­case before return­ing home. Sus­pi­cion fell on a too soft and not very reli­able (although GoPro has the same) seal, which it was decid­ed to slight­ly seal by lift­ing it up. How­ev­er, there was nowhere to test the box after the upgrade, because there are no deep reser­voirs near­by, and it’s lazy to drag it some­where. After all, the 21st cen­tu­ry is in the yard, and 4 atmos­pheres can be obtained even at home with the help of a car pump.

But it was dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a con­ve­nient ves­sel for such tests until an old Sovi­et pres­sure cook­er caught my eye.

Instead of a weight, a piece of hose with a sleeve from an auto-nip­ple was attached to the bleed valve (which is now com­mon­ly called smart in mul­ti­cook­ers).

Fur­ther, the entire pres­sure cook­er was filled with water, and a box was placed in it, after which an excess pres­sure of 1 to 4 atmos­pheres was cre­at­ed by a pump.

The weight inside keeps the box on the bot­tom of the pan. Expe­ri­ence has con­firmed that box­ing does flow sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly. But it was still inter­est­ing where exact­ly, because there are many options. To deter­mine the exact loca­tion of the leak, for the next test, the box was filled with toi­let paper (gray to bet­ter see the mois­ture), and crushed to 1 excess atmos­phere.

Leaks are clear­ly vis­i­ble on the paper impres­sion.

Such a large spot was obtained at 4 atmos­pheres. With one, its diam­e­ter was half that. As it turned out, the box is leak­ing at the point of attach­ment to the tri­pod, where a met­al nut is insert­ed into the plas­tic. At the same time, the seal does not let in any­where. The down­side of this set­up is the inabil­i­ty to test the box but­tons for leaks. If some­how box­ing can be brought back to life, this will def­i­nite­ly be the next note.