Prevco Subsea Housings, a Fountain Hills manufacturing firm, brought in a heavy duty 297-ton crane, along with a smaller 97-ton version, Thursday morning, Dec. 18, to lift new equipment into its plant at Laser and Technology drives.

Tempe Crane did the heavy lifting on the project, easing a 15-ton cylinder down through a roof opening.

The installation involved a 15,000 psi solid steel testing tank weighing more than 30,000 pounds.

Prevco manufactures housings for electronic equipment and cameras used at deep sea levels, and the tank will be used to assure the housings are water tight before use at sea.

The test tank, made in Belgium, will allow Prevco to test undersea vessels at simulated depths around 30,000 feet, approaching the maximum depth of the Mariana Trench.

The installation is a major project for the company, and Prevco President John Head hopes there will be others who want to use the test tank.

Head said there are no other tanks like this in Arizona and only a few on the West Coast. He said he has already heard from companies wanting to use the facility once it is up and running.

An enclosure for the tank is being built inside the larger building, which extends about 10 feet above the existing roof.

The tank itself is about 10 feet tall and three to four feet in diameter. The interior of the vessel is about two feet in diameter.

A self-described “nerd,” Head started Prevco in his garage on Mustang Drive in 1999.

For 14 years the company operated well under the radar; few people in Fountain Hills even knew it existed until just a couple of years ago when Head started looking for the opportunity to expand his operations.

Prevco makes leak- proof underwater housings for equipment used mostly for aquatic applications.

The containers they build can take sensitive electronic equipment or cameras to depths of 20,000 feet. The housings are made of a range of materials including stainless steel, aluminum, titanium, ceramic and plastic.

Head said they are sometimes asked to make vessels with connectors that robots can use to connect or disconnect equipment.

In an interview in 2013 Head said they get a lot of requests for housings for undersea cameras.

One enclosure was built to house a high speed video camera on the deck of a submarine to obtain super slow motion on missile launches.

Prevco is also asked to build ruggedized housings for applications in extreme environments. One such item is a camera enclosure used in Antarctica.

Always alert for ways to use a camera, Prevco employees attached a GoPro camera inside the test tank to record the trip from the back parking lot to being lifted down through the roof.