By 1984 Slingsby Engineering were now the owners of UMEL, which had been bought out a year or so before. In the spring of 1985 Slingsby decided to down size UMEL and I left the Company. At about this time I received a phone call from Phil Nuytten, President of CanDive. He had parted company with Oceaneering a short while before. He asked me if I would be interested in going to Vancouver to work on a new suit he was planning to build. In September of that year I flew to Vancouver to start work. Phil had made a number of fiberglass mock-ups of his new suit. He had employed a local engineer to work on a rotary joint design that he had patented. Hi s design was very similar to the joint I had built at UMEL in 1981. But there was no working prototype yet. I spent a couple of weeks in Vancouver with Phil going over the options for the new design. I persuaded him to go with the waist entry, similar to that on SAM. I also reconfigured the design to follow the AX2 joint geometry; It uses fewer joints. I then traveled to Nova Scotia to set up shop in the Can-Dive base in Halifax. The move to Halifax was for financial reasons, but it meant that I would be operating on my own with respect to the design of the suit. Phil visited a few times during the nine months we spent building the first prototype.

This prototype suit was made of aluminum alloy. The limbs were machined out of solid bar stock, and the torso was fabricated from hemispherical spinnings and machined pieces, only the boots were castings. This method of manufacture was the same as that used in the construction of the SAMs. The suit was largely complete by mid 1986. Phil decided to ship it back to Vancouver so that he could display it at Expo 86, then in full swing in Vancouver. After a short stay in Vancouver

I returned to the UK, the project being put on hold pending further financing. I returned to Vancouver in January 1987 to start work on the first production suit. Phil had formed a new company, International Hard Suits Ltd., to build what became the Newt Suit. We set up shop in a building on Welch Street in North Vancouver. The first job was to complete the prototype and get it in the water. This involved fitting the life support system and doing more development work on the joints, which were still not very reliable.

Because of the method of construction the prototype was rather bulbous. I wanted to improve on this for the production suits so I decided to use castings for most of the suit; only the joints and spacers were machined from bar stock. The final result is, I think more elegant than the prototype. The suit concept is based very much on the Ames AX-2. The life support system is a direct copy of that fitted in the UMEL suits. The manipulators are direct descendants of those fitted to the prototype SAM. The thruster pack is a direct descendent of several we built at UMEL for use on the JIM suits.

Projects like JIM and SAM are complex and are not the product of one individual. Whilst I was responsible for the design and development work carried out at UMEL, I had help and advice from a number of other people. Dr David Dennison oversaw the design of the life support system, Dick Tuson was a mine of useful information based on a long career in underwater engineering, Mike Borrow kept the whole thing together, Pop Peress worked with me for the first part of the JIM project and provided much background information. The Newt Suit project was much the same. I brought all the experience gained during my years at UMEL, Phil provided the opportunity to combine hi s desire to build a new suit with my know-how. International Hard Suits built about twenty Newt Suits between 1987 and 1996, apart from the commercial customers; various navies have shown an interest in the suit. In 1995 the US navy ordered a 2000ft version. The standard joints were good for 1000ft. I had to redesign them to work at the greater depth. The torso and limb spacers were completely redesigned to satisfy the new specification.

The newt suit on his way to work. You can clearly see the thruster unit with propellers