Like many small business owners, Arthur Davis wants to steer his company in a new direction but he has his hands full just keeping the ship afloat.

Davis owns South El Monte-based Oritex Corp., a plastic manufacturer that for 23 years has provided high-strength implements to Southern California waste water treatment plants.

With the fiscal tough times of the 1990s pressing down upon local governments including the 1995 bankruptcy by Orange County Davis found himself facing an economic abyss.

“I saw us go from having more than $1 million in revenues (at the peak in 1994) to having less than $300,000 (at the bottom in 1996),” he said.

The situation has improved this year, but left Davis with a burning desire to diversify.

And in his years of working with high-strength plastics and composites, he believes he has discovered a terrific product: extra-strong, lightweight chains, which could used for everything from bicycles to making huge links for industrial purposes.

“Can you imagine the applications for this?” asks Davis, who holds advanced degrees in industrial engineering and metallurgy from the University of London and the University of Chicago, respectively.

“The market is world wide. In military, commercial, recreation whenever and wherever somebody needs a chain that is light, or which will not corrode,’ he said.

Imagine a tank stranded in the desert, said Davis. It needs to connect to another tank 30 yards ahead. An iron chain strong enough to pull a tank would weigh tons, he said. “But with a plastic chain, a single man could connect the two tanks.”

In his factory, Davis has on display different chains. Some links are more than a foot long, other a couple inches. All are of various plastics, composites or fiberglass. Strengths are listed, into the hundreds of thousands of pounds.

For a visitor, he picks out a small link, about a half-inch wide, and 10 inches long. Under testing in a nearby machine, it snaps at 22,000 pounds, about 10 tons. “You could pick up a truck with that,” he said.

Davis has tests slated for the City of Los Angeles and an unidentified oil company to demonstrate his new chains and technologies, some of which are patented.

He has one chain-link, about the size of a bed pillow, that he expects to snap but only when tugged with 2 million pounds of pressure.

But as with other small businesses, he complains about being hampered by the lack of funds for marketing, and by having contacts, for both his sewage products and the potential chain business. “Sometimes it’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” he said, referring to municipal contracting practices.

A five-person shop, Oritex has survived to date not by making exotic chains as would be Davis’ wont, but by providing large plastic sprockets and drive shafts used in municipal wastewater treatment plants.

The 20-foot-long shafts, and 30-inch diameter sprockets are made of wound fiberglass, graphite composites and ultra-high molecular weight polyethelene, a very strong plastic.

The big sprockets help drive sewage tank collectors, which scrap sludge off of tank walls.

Oritex’s components are strong, and do not corrode an important advantage in a wastewater treatment plant, in which corrosion is a constant concern.

By the time sludge water gets to the City of Los Angeles’ Hyperion treatment plant, it is oozing sulphur worse, ferric chloride is added, making for an acidic brew, according to Carl Rogers, city maintenance manager at the plant.

“The sludge is very, very corrosive,” said Rogers. “Iron will pit and corrode.” Rogers said Oritex’ products and components are known for durability and thus valued by maintenance workers, who must make repairs when parts wear out.

But Oritex parts are also expensive, even by Davis’ admission: “We cost about six times as much as iron. But we last four times as long,” he said. The parts are bought because expensive downtime is avoided.

Oritex has survived more than two decades producing what Davis calls the “Rolls-Royce” of implements for Hyperion and other sewage treatment plants.

But fortunes have not been made. Davis, who has never drawn a salary but always planned to, had to postpone indefinitely the thought of an owner’s draw when municipalities began to declare bankruptcy.

Davis has run ads in the California Water Pollution Control Association magazine, but reaching sewer districts outside the West hasn’t even been attempted: ‘How do you find the time and money to do that?” he asks. He noted there are more than 16,400 sewer districts in the United States.

Learning the ropes of selling to any particular city is difficult. There are new “request for proposal” forms, specifications, deadlines, personalities and connections to be made, said Davis. Attending trade shows takes time and money.

Without staff, his time is eaten up by nagging but essential demands, rather than personal marketing efforts which might yield payoffs. “If the workers need another hand to pack something, then I help pack,” he said.

Indeed, all about the 10,000-square-foot factory are the visible signs of an entrepreneur struggling to invent and produce, but save a dime.

Behemoth fabricating equipment has been purchased for pennies on the dollar, some of it nearly 70 years old. “This was made in the 1920s,” said Davis, looking at a stamped date on a circular, horizontal lathe. “I got it at an industrial auction.”

Another machine is stamped as having been patented in 1905. All the equipment is painted in the enamel green uniformly found on old metal-working machinery.

But recently, the picture has become less turbid for Davis. Orange and Los Angeles counties, and the City of Los Angeles, “are beginning to order again.”

He also is circulating a business plan, with the hopes of raising $850,000 from a minority business partner, who would be interested in marketing. There are the upcoming tests of his new chains and links for possible major buyers.

Davis even sees a market in bicycle chains. Much of the bicycling world is obessessed with weight, be it racers (or wanna-be’s) or mountain bikers (who begrudge every ounce). “A plastic chain would weigh ounces,” he said. “And I can make miles of the stuff.”