Marine electronics equipment is becoming ever more sophisticated. care is needed to ensure that cables are not the weak point in its performance.
Just over a year ago, in a slight departure from its core business, Seatronics set up a cable-moulding facility at its base in Houston. Sales manager Mark Teles explains the thinking behind the move, which it seems was inspired, as the company is now doubling its moulding capacity.
According to Teles, the unit was established for a combination of reasons. “First, we saw an opportunity to save money: our spend on cable repair and maintenance was approaching $140,000 per year. We were also getting more calls from clients wanting customised cables, often at very short notice, to enable them to combine different items of electronic equipment for specific tasks. But perhaps the most important factor was our concern about the quality of the cables occasionally supplied with the marine electronics equipment that we rent or sell.”
Teles believes that it does not makes sense to send out a sophisticated and often expensive item of imaging or survey equipment with an inherent weak point: the cabling that constitutes its lifeline by providing power, control and the ability to transfer data to the surface. “You hear reports of critical and costly survey operations being suspended while waiting for replacement cables to be sent offshore,” he says. “It is a potential problem that costs so little to avoid.”
Quality is therefore the keynote for Seatronics’ cable-moulding facility. It comes through in the design, development and testing of the moulds, almost all of which is done in-house. The company has also investigated the formulation of the primers and the moulding resins with their manufacturers to optimise them for this particular application. You get a sense of quality in the written procedures that describe the way individual cables are made up, and, not least, in the rigour of the quality control process to which every piece of work is subjected.
As well as the quality ethic, Seatronics has quickly forged a reputation for the compact nature of its mouldings. This is a great advantage when, for example, connecting up equipment on board a small, complex remotely operated vehicle. And it is not trivial to design a compact moulding that does not leak at 3700 m plus in the Gulf of Mexico.
Having a superior cable-moulding facility in-house and being able to respond to customers’ requests for individual cables, often within 24 hours or less, has meant a rapid rise in third-party business. Major remotely operated vehicle companies, equipment manufacturers, oceanographic surveyors and service companies have begun to view Seatronics as valuable point of contact when they have critical cabling requirements. Incidentally, the facility has also resulted in Seatronics becoming the main representative for Burton connectors in the Gulf of Mexico, and possibly in Singapore and Abu Dhabi in the future.
“It has been satisfying to see the new cable-moulding business take off in the way that it has,” says Teles. “We have established a capability that is highly complementary to Seatronics’ main offering and adds significant value to our customers’ operations.”
Cable moulding
Adding connectors to multi-core cable (or simply splicing or dividing it) is routine. The challenge, when dealing with cable that is going to be used subsea, comes in reinstating the plastic sheath that protects against the hostile, high-pressure environment. This is done by priming the conductors with special adhesion promoters, placing them in a mould and introducing either a neoprene or a two-part polyurethane resin. The aim is to create a divide, splice or connector that has the same resilience as the main cable run.