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Experience with the RCV-125 soon led to a fully-fledged commercial version, the RCV-225, which Martech also ordered. The second American customer for the vehicle was Taylor Diving, a company that became a major operator of ROVs.
The RCV-225 was a great success. As John Lawrence of the former British submersible and ROV builder OSEL observed:
"Hydro Products had something nobody else had and margins were high, so they pumped the profits into research and development. It was lovely. The RCV-225 did a lot of work; nobody had been able to look under water before and move around, unless you sent a diver or a submersible down."
By 1983, there were 56 RCV-225s at work around the world.
After buying the RCV-125, Martech set up a separate division and hired an engineer to manage it. The company also enlisted electronics technicians to maintain and operate its vehicles, but found that divers, who were used to finding their way around a structure without becoming entangled, generally made better pilots. Nonetheless the technicians were still needed to keep the vehicles running, and eventually they became good pilots themselves. Necessity being the mother of invention, the crews soon devised ways of extending the remote eyeball's capabilities, for example by rigging up a hook or arm to take down a messenger line and reeve it through a shackle.
Initially the typical diver, particularly in the Gulf of Mexico, regarded the robot vehicle as a threat. The oil companies, on the other hand, were enthusiastic. For inspections beyond 200'/61M—and many of the deeper dives were for inspection—the little vehicles were less expensive than divers. They were also more effective because an engineer could see the situation for himself instead of having to rely on a diver's description or drawing. To make sure the industry knew what was on offer, Martech set up a tank at the annual Offshore Technology Conference in Houston, where they gave oilmen a chance to try their hand at piloting. Considering how profitable ROVs were for Martech almost from the start, Culbertson was surprised his competitors did not get into the business sooner than they did—even if, as some thought, he initially offered the ROV at no charge as a sweetener for obtaining diving contracts. (In the early years, an RCV-225 went out for some $3,500 a day, an unheard of rate for an inspection vehicle compared with the start of the 1990s.)
Another American company who went into ROVs early on was Michel Lecler Divers of Harvey, Louisiana. In 1974–77, Chris Nicholson, then employed by Lecler, developed a vehicle named the Recorp Mk 3, which he built using components from military salvage yards and various other sources. Michel Lecler Divers was subsequently bought by the Dutch company Smit International, for whom Nicholson designed and built three ROVs: a nuclear inspection vehicle, a 30 h.p. hydraulic salvage-claw ROV, and the Smit Sub 1000 oilfield vehicle.
In January 1982, Nicholson started his own company, Deep Sea Systems International. His first product was the Articulator, a mini-manipulator for the RCV-225 and other small ROVs. In October 1983, Nicholson introduced the MiniRover, a 60-pound ROV that sold for under $30,000, the first of a new category of vehicles referred to as "Low-Cost ROVs".
In 1976, Martech did the initial work for the setting of Exxon's platform Hondo in the Santa Barbara Channel, at 850'/259M and entirely with ROVs. Later they installed the tanker-loading monobuoy in 500'/152M of water, using ROVs and saturation diving. The planning for putting in the mooring system went on for a year, largely under the direction of Jerry Ruse, an old hand from the early days of helium diving. The actual job was completed in 26 days, at a very substantial profit.
Despite such successes, several years later as a result of a disastrous decision to diversify into pipe laying, Martech was forced to seek protection under Chapter 11 of the federal bankruptcy code. Meanwhile, the company had bought what must have been one of the first TROV vehicles from the Canadian company McElhanney Offshore Surveying and Engineering—later International Submarine Engineering (I.S.E.)—and built their own manned observation submarine,
Pioneer 1.
Neither proved particularly profitable. Disposing of the pipeline division and getting the company out of bankruptcy took almost three years. Culbertson liquidated the division in Singapore and concentrated on Martech’s core business of diving and ROV services, mostly in the Gulf but also in Alaska, where they dominated the market, and in California. By then, however, for lack of capital, they had lost their lead in ROVs.
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