1st prototype built by Dave Thompson - 91

 

He was my trimix instructor starting November 1994. During these meetings he mentioned he was developing a Closed Circuit rebreather.

The month before,  I dived the semi-closed Prism with Peter Readey and John Beaumont - and discussions took place between us from then until March 1995.

January 1995 I visited Draeger and undertook to build their harness and BC for their semi-closed rebreather - later to be called the Atlantis and eventually - the Dolphin.

 

We made components for Dave Thompson in March/April 1995. I dived this prototype for the first time in May 1995 and it was the easiest rebreather I had dived with. You will need to confirm with Dave, but I guess this was 3rd or 4th prototype.

 

I was reminded at the DEMA show in October 2002,  that my first words after that dive, when I took the mouthpiece out were "We're gonna build this!"

 

In order to build it we had to re-design everything to reduce the work of breathing, to improve the performance of the CO2 scrubber, to improve redundancy, and to improve the PO2 control but you have to hand it to Dave, many of the original features and thoughts regarding failure modes are still evident on the product.

 

CE approval was born in mind from the design stage on - our first visit to DERA was in May 1996 with 1st actual testing by them in July 1996.

 

We have our own ANSTI breathing machine, in fact we were the first company to buy a complete ANSTI system, so no time is wasted in manufacturing components that we think will be okay - we moved forward on what we knew would work.

 

The manual inflators are a good case in point: the base for those, we produce thousands each year for the BCs - it's the cylinder post base, we know they will fit to the BC inner and outer bag without leaks. We already made a dry suit inflator, which wouldn't fit onto the BC inner/outer without leaking, but it was a good reliable valve and sealed fine on dry suits. So, we simply had to change the inflator so it fitted into the jacket's "cylinder post" base and we would then have a drain valve in each counterlung and both oxygen and diluent manual inflators. Before it was sold in numbers on rebreathers though we had to change the thread to a coarse thread to make it more diver friendly.

 

 

1st exhibition was the IANTD Conference at Swindon in June 1996.

 

1st open water trimix dive was done by me in July 1997. 

 

CE testing was finished in May 1997. Paperwork then came through some time later.

 

1st sale - November 1997

 

There have been no alterations to the core oxygen control software.

 

 

Extra analysis was introduced with the backlights to reject cells with wayward outputs - either low or high.

 

hope this helps