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Questions entered my head like: How sturdy will it be? Am I going to find out why nobody has used it before? Will it be practical? Is it worth the added weight.

The day after I received the new cab and chassis from the dealer, I used a cordless drill to drill holes for the nut�s and bolts I used for pivot points in the two by fours I mounted to a pair of car-jack stands. In conjunction with the bare frame of the truck I constructed a life size model of my contraption to determine the geometry involved.

My method building a model for determining the geometry was quite primitive and I didn't know of any other supply source for hydraulics other than the Northern Hydraulics catalog, but with the assistance of a chart in the catalog, I was able to decide on the size cylinders I was going to use. The longest cylinder stroke offered in the catalog was limited to 36 inches, but my funky geometry showed me that it would be long enough. The tricky part of determining the components needed was the "assisting mechanical" part. Though 12 inch stroke cylinders seemed to be a bit long for the room available for the assisting mechanical, but I happened to like the simple ratio of 3 to 1 and figured having the simple ratio would make it easier to make an automatic operating system by synchronizing the movements of the two pairs if operating one pair at a time would cause the carrier to clip the frame rails. At that time, with the primitive way of performing the movements of the system, the geometry was so close I knew it could go either way. As a precautionary measure I ordered only three hydraulic cylinders in case I found I needed to use a smaller size with the assisting mechanical when it came time to fabricate the components. I figured it would be better to waste only $150.00 instead of $300.00 if I'd have to use a shorter stroke cylinder within the confined space that was available.

When I first began the project realized that I'd never seen such a contraption before, but I did realize the potential of such a system. The thing that I didn't realize was the value of it if it was patentable. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that if it did work, there would be other people with the desire to own a system like it too. Since the contraption appeared to be novel I wondered how I could find out if whether or not it was patentable and whether it had been patented.

After ordering the cylinders I knew I could easily prove I was the true inventor of the contraption and now from studying patent law, I've learn it's what they call, " Reduction of Practice."

After ordering the hydraulic cylinders, I rounded up the necessary lumber needed to build a temporary flat bed for the back of the truck to use while I gathered the necessary materials to build the contraption.

The temp wooden bed

The wooden flat bed box on my truck worked out quite well except for the fact it was too light. Without any weight in it, the stiff suspension of the truck provided a ruff ride and another fall back was as winter approached it would freeze and make a lot of cracking sounds whenever I hit bumps in the road. This became a bit annoying and made it more urgent for me to make some-thing out of the materials and components I had gathered for my contraption.

Patent Industry

Trying to find out about the patent industry was a lesson in itself. First I went to the local library looked for a book on the subject. I found a book on patent law and had to reserve it because it was well in demand. When I did receive the book I found it to be out dated. Then I went to a book store and bought a more complete and more current book called, " Patent it yourself" .

Prior to reading these two books I had thought the cost of acquiring a patent was up there at about a hundred thousand dollars and out if my reach you might say. Excitement settled in after I learned that a patent will usually cost about five to ten thousand dollars to acquire. Upon learning about the patent application process, I realized I had come up with a good idea and the contraption I was constructing was well indeed patentable.

I realize now should have skipped a lot of the evaluation part and paid more attention to the general rules and ways patentable ideas can be stolen. Of course the way I see it is that lawyers aren't going to write about all the important stuff in books, because why would we need them for? You have to remember that most of them have accounts working for corporations and they are unlikely to tell you about the pitfalls of being a private inventor.

My priorities began to change my house became less import-ant to me because becoming a surfer I realized that there were many places in the world that I wanted to experience. At times I felt married to the responsibility of being a home-owner and the business that tied me down to the town of Tacoma. I've always thought a house was nothing more than a bunch of two by fours and I began to realize that if I could build a proto-type and patent it, I could afford as many two by fours anyone could ever want and where ever I wanted them to be.

By the end of the year 1994, just gathering the components, materials and the necessary hand tools to build my contraption began to add up to much more than I anticipated. The fact is had spent well over five thousand dollars for the supplies and still didn't have all the equipment necessary for fabrication the proto-type. Within the first few weeks of 95, I purchased the welder, a cutting-torch outfit, drill-press and a chop-saw.

The first thing I fabricated with the new chop-saw and welder was a overhead trolley system consisting of a 16 ft. section of 4 inch I-beam supported by A-frames at each end fabricated out of 2" pipe. I repositioned the loading dock so that it extended out from the house and placed the 16 ft. I-bean across the loading dock with room to park my truck underneath it next to the loading dock. With the use of a chain hoist and trolley I was able to transfer equipment off my truck and on to the loading dock, visa versa.

With the use of the overhead trolley and chain hoist, I lifted the temporary wooden bed off my truck and placed it on the back of my old truck. I made some rear fenders out of partial cuts of a fifty five gallon barrel and welded them to cross members I made out of 1,1/4 " square tubes bolted to the truck's frame. Off the back of the fenders I hung pieces of old rubber foot fatigue mat for mud flaps

Driving the truck around with nothing but the make-shift fenders on the back made the truck looked as though part of it was missing. One time I got a kick out of a guy sitting in his truck at an intersection as looked over and said, " Nice fenders." I took it as a compliment because I felt proud to have one of the first new Dodge cab and chassis around and an important project underway.

It wasn't long before I realized that a chop saw performed lousy angle cuts and with accuracy in mind, a metal band-saw was in order. It was the same way with the bench top drill press I'd bought initially. After the chuck falling out every ten minutes, I knew I had to go with the real macoy, so I went out and spent $300.00 on a freestanding model comprising of three inch pipe and 5/8� MT-2 (?) chuck.

The arrangement of equipment and space within my house came together pretty well. I had my compressor and acetylene tank outfit inside my bedroom to the left of the back door and just inside to the right of the backdoor I had a drill press and next to it, a couple of roll-around tool boxes. The band-saw partitioned off the back corner of the large "L" shaped room into a small work area.

Along the north wall, I kept my stock of steel on the floor. Most of the stock consisted of remnants because I could buy rems' at discount prices compared to partial or full length stock. I bought much of it because I didn't know at the time of what I would need so I bought the steel that I thought would be useful. I never realized that I was building a magic scrape pile that would come in handy later.

Above the steel stock were the boarded off windows I had and mounted a massive set of gray plastic parts bends for nuts, bolts and hydraulic fittings. I had more parts bends mounted on the wall next to the drill-press by the rear door-way, 50 in all. Believe me, over the next few months I had all of them filled with supplies. All in all, I had the place pretty well organized if you ask me.

With all the new equipment I had brought home just got my project underway. I'd made some modifications to the 4" I-beams used for carrier rails for my system. I had them placed on car stands and leveled up to insure square-ness and proper width for the cross-members I was in the process of installing.

Where to start

One of the first questions I had to ask myself when I began to design my system was: Where do I start? The carrier, the back mounts to the truck frame, or the lower front cylinder mounts?

I had to go with the lower front cylinder mounts because they determined where the cylinder mounts would have to be mounted to the front bulkhead of the carrier. My design began with fastening the side plates with the use of bolts going through factory holes in the truck's frame rails. Only a couple of the holes had to be drilled out for larger bolts as I recall. The first obstacle was the emergency brake cable mount had to be remove and a new one had to be designed into the lower front cylinder mounts.

The front bulkhead was a complicated part to assemble. On a �" plate T-1 steel covered with layout dye, I laid out the hydraulic motors, shafts I had key-ways cut by a local machine shop, bearing and sprockets I'd bought from Kaman Bearings, and pieces of I-beam and angle iron for where the carrier rails would meet. I scribed out lines on what was going to be the bulkhead. It was quite complicated to say the least, because I remember it took a bowl or two and quit a bit of head scratching.

When I was welding the flanges and mounts in place for the front bulkhead, it started to resemble something more than I expected. A close friend will call Ken came by and even he got excited at the progress when he saw the part taking shape. I had the pulley block bearing mounts and the flat trim bordering the outer edge was welded in place. Ken got stoked and mentioned it was beginning to resemble something and said, " It looks like a work of art."

What I was doing with a tape measure, level and a few squires was quite primitive compared to how major corporations have the same kind of things done. Although I wasn't investing millions, I felt blessed to be doing the same kind of thing. I began to realize the special talent I had within me and I became very proud of my project because I had the gut feeling that it was going to be a major mark in history. As a result of the passion for my project, I took it on as the most important job in my lifetime. I wanted to design it to be built with the best workmanship and quality of engineering as I possibly could. As I saw things take shape, I realized it didn't look like the weird of contraption I had imagined it would be when I first sketched it out on paper.

My only fall back was the amount of time I had to perform such a task because of the fear of having the electricity turned off at any time. Also my supply sources were some-what limited because the lack of knowledge I had as where to find the materials I needed. I put a large amount of consideration in to the detail of each component I made because the cost of a real good design and a not so good design was about the same for a guy who's building it by himself. I thought that the aspect of details for a project like mine is what makes or breaks a good system. A more refined design wasn't costing me anything but time and during the winter I had plenty of that because of the weather.

A few of the goals for my design were to fit the necessary components into the least amount of space as possible, to keep the payload as close to the cab as possible, to keep the carrier frame rails from extending any more than needed from the rear of truck, to achieve the lowest center of gravity, to design it with as much trolley travel within the carrier as possible and to design it so that it would only be fastened to the truck's frame with the use of bolts through the original holes provided in the frame from the factory. For every fraction of an inch there was to gain on I used it.

The lower rear mounts for the actuating member became a very complex one for me. It amounted to crawling under the ass end of the truck no less than a hundred times I would imagine, or at least it felt like it because I felt like I lived under there for quite some time.

To begin with it consist of welded flanges and pieces of angle iron which wrap the rear frame rails on three sides with large bolts fastening it them in place. One of the nice factors of my system is that no welding was done to the truck's factory frame. Everything is removable and the truck can be returned to its original state.

One of the things that became obvious when building the main carrier was that it was just too easy to weld things into place. I had to consider methods of maintenance and serviceability. A person has to be able to remove things such as the shafts, motors, bearings and that alone is just one of the many challenges involved when designing such a system. Believe me it was something I had to think about because there is an order for the parts to be installed and or removed in a particular sequences.
Once the front and rear bulkheads were welded onto the carrier, it got to be a bitch trying to roll it out onto the loading dock on dollies. It didn't take long before I came up with a better way of handling the heavy parts and I'm sure I didn't score any points with the neighbors when I had a forty foot section of I-beam delivered. I used the trolley system to hoist the I-beam up to the underside of the floor joist of the second story of the house. I fastened half of its length to the floor joist by welding flat bar on its edge to the top of the I-beam, drilled holes through the flat bar and fastened it with lag bolts to the overhead joist. The I-beam came though the wall above the door at a slight angle so that I could place the carrier towards one side of my dinning room. The I-beam went through the dinning room and ended up in the north end of the front room where I put a post to help support the very end of the I-beam. I had the other twenty foot of the sticking out of the house above the loading dock which I relocate-ed back parallel to the wall so that I'd have 16 feet of trolley travel in my backyard. I supported the outer most end of the I-beam by intersecting it with the 16 ft. section of I-been with A-frame support legs. This made it possible to drive the truck between the A-frame support legs and park strait under the outer 16 foot length of the forty foot rail.

I bet most guys with a wife and kids would find themselves sleeping in the garage if they wanted to do what I did. I doubt if many women would let their husbands sacrifice their home and spend more than year's time and money building some kind of contraption - without a divorce.

The pressure from the lack of time available had an effect on the type of pillow blocks I used. And one of the things I've learned about proto-typing is that it's nice to have a couple of everything. If I had more time I would've made a few more of trips to the supply sources and I would've taken advantage of more bearing options available. At the time though, I knew the price of everything I used would be lower if bought in quantities. The standard "P" type of pillow blocks I was bought would normally cost about $25 to $30 if bought them one at a time. By buying imports from Japan, ten at a time, I got them for about $10.50 each. The fallback of trying to use the same type of bearing through out the system was that I ended up using one more shaft, two more bearings and two more sprockets, than if I'd designed the system with using either two of four flange type four-bolt pillow block bearing within the design. If fact when I build my next system, I plan to use at least three types of pillow block bearings within the design.

At times I found myself working 12 to 16 hour days on it trying to get finished before the city would pull the plug. I did the cutting touch work and grinding for during the day time and saved the drilling and welding for the nighttime. Although I'd gutted my house and pressure washed the inside of the shell to insure there wouldn't be any smoke smell in the house when it was completed. I sure did a number on it by welding in it. Even though it was cold when the temperature reached below 40 degrees in the middle of the night, I found myself having to open up the door to let the smoke out and there went the heat as well, but the heat rising from the hot steel kept me going.

Trying to use the truck for work while fabricating my system only made advancements in the development more of a difficult task. To prepare it for work, I'd have to stop what I was doing and usually have to take off some of parts I'd made, then bolt on a tool box and a sheet of floor decking and I'd use straps to hold painting equipment in place.

When the major fabrication was done, I installed the system on the truck. With the aid of the overhead trolley and chain hoist I lifted the carrier and made it go through the motions. It looked magnificent but I confirmed that the movements were too much to be able actuate the hydraulic cylinders in the assisting mechanical all the way through their stroke without the carrier of the system clipping the rear frame rails of the truck. Though I knew I could make it work manually with three hydraulic controls, I knew it was important to have it operable for anyone to use it because I'm only human and eventually some dark night when I'd be tired with other things on my mind, I'd screw up and clip the frame rails. With as much power as hydraulics can generate, I, regret not having it work automatically.

As an experiment I used the chain hoist and with the use of cargo straps to limit the movements of the cylinders to 1/3 extenuation increments. I determined that if the cylinders moved at the same proportion the system moved through the motions without clipping the frame rails with plenty of clearance to spare for deviations in those proportions.

Although and the words hydraulic synchronization wasn't exactly in my vocabulary before I learned about hydraulics, the mistake on my part was being the type of guy who always seems to try to get to the important part of a book and this is where my own characteristics backfired on me. I should've read the first page about synchronizing hydraulics in my text book where it was mentioned that synchronization wasn't always accurate. But to my knowledge it seemed to me that spitting the fluid into percentages was an easier task than sequencing because sequencing would take some electrical switches combined with hydraulic relief valves. At the time it seemed to me that a more complex method with electrical wiring left more room for something to go wrong because if switch wore out or something just shorted out, things could go haywire combined with the power of hydraulics a simple problem could be drastic so I choose to use synchronization as an operating system.

Even though the 1 to 3 proportioning theory was a simple one, it wasn't as simple as you might think when you have to make sure there isn't hydraulic chatter from forcing fluids back together at a predetermined rate. With the addition of cushion valves to eliminate any possible chatter problems the system became more sophisticated than I had originally thought and the cost of those extra components and extra hose assemblies to connect them all brought the total of hose assemblies up to 52. Originally when I took on the project, I figured that the expense of hose assemblies would be about five to seven hundred dollars boy was I ever wrong. Though the extra expense was something I had not planed on, after all the work I had put into the system, the additional cost of an operating system didn't discourage me any.

I opted for the gear type flow dividers (somewhat like a gear pump design) because the book said that they were more accurate than the spool type (somewhat like a control) but of course the expense was higher for that choice too. The fall back of the original system was that if I wanted to run the motors at the sametime as the cylinders, the synchronization would go out of proportion a bit. Another fall back I didn't think about at the time was that it would limit the choice of cylinder sizes and combination that could be used in other systems in the future.(But the fact that the cylinder sizes I was using was a easy 1 to 3 ratio, had influenced my direction for an operating system.)

As for the power source: Two "A" belts will handle about 15 horse power. There are algebraic equations to figure everything out as far as cubic feet per minute and the pressure being used is another ball of wax, but just finding a place for a pump is the thing many of us have wondered about since Chrysler builds their trucks like cars. (The PTO adapters on transmissions or transfer cases are pretty much worthless when you need to be able to operate the truck.) So an electric clutch pump under the hood was the solution. A place back east came up with an adapter that consisted a pump mount, a different pulley which included the double A-belt + serpentine belt that had to be installed in place of the original. A different water bottle and mount for the windshield washer. The radiator hose had to be replaced by a special shaped tube with a 90 degree bend type hose.

I bought a Commercial Intertec clutch pump from Northern Hydraulics. I tell you I scored there because they don't sell the same one any more but from what I've heard; they are bullit proof. They are good for 3,000 psi and 3,000 RPMs. Since it never gets more than 1,500 RPMs it's only delivering somewhere between 12 to 18 gallons per minute. However, just the pump adapter was $500.oo pluse the pump put the cost of the power source at just a bit under a grand.

(Helpful Hint: Ever realized that you lead battery terminal clamp isn't going to work any more. Add life with a C-clamp, but make sure it isn't going to short out on anything especially if it's a positive; like will the hood hit when you close the hood?) Rule No. 77 because you've got to be an idiot to copy anything I do, but what the hell, 14 years later and it's still works fine.

(Let's step out of the time frame of the story for a bit.)

A couple years later I decided to rebuild the system with a few refinements. I also took the opportunity to cut out some of the unnecessary weight while I was at it. One modification was to increase the angle of dump from about 42 degrees to about 47 just by moving the location of the mounts for the front actuators back six inches.

After I learned that the $35.00 micro-switches had a life span of over a million cycles and realized I could mount the switches where they were out of the way from foreign objects that might cause damage to them so my concern over the reliability of the part electronic -- part hydraulic operating system changed quite a bit. I wanted sequenced operating system because it would allow me to run the motors at the same time as the cylinders and cut down on the cycle time involved.

The sequence operating system I came up with utilizes two switches operated by the movement of the assisting mechanical, a couple of sequence type relief valve in combination pilot to open check valves, and a couple of check valves. Though the sequenced system may sound sophisticated to the layman, it's fairly strait forward and brought the number of hose assemblies down to about 40 and that number could be brought down further if the components were integrated into a one piece manifold block.

With the new operating system, I can either watch a pressure gauge or the assisting mechanical while running the motors at the same time as the cylinders without kicking in the sequence to much. Doing so, the cycle times are decreased quite a bit.

In my opinion a computer type operated system with electronic sensors and a programmable logic control is in the future. Just think, and I-Pod could someday operate the Synchro-link.

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