Bob

a fellow i worked with used a similar two-panel insert in his briefcase/toolbox.

he used the snap rings they use for loose leaf binding as hinges.

I beg you to reconsider the formal development of this idea. I think it is truly significant and I maybe uniquely qualified to make that assertion.

First, just let me say, I am not a professional woodworker but rather a tinkerer in many things. I made my living in computers. I grew up on a farm and have always used and loved tools of all kinds.

I have just recently begin to recover from a serious illness of many years duration. In the course of the illness I went from being a tall, powerful and capable man to a stooped, weak, pain wracked, near-cripple. This forced a major change in my attitudes towards (among other things) my tools and their organization.

Before, I was content to leave my tools more or less in piles in toolboxes or improvised containers. When I was hale, it was no matter to rummage through many tools and boxes to find what I wanted. I didn’t have to be efficient either because I wasn’t using the tools to make my living. After a I weakened, however, rummaging became painful, exhausting and waste of what little up time I had. I became somewhat obsessed with creating organizing systems that would let me quickly and painlessly (literally) find the tools to get a job done before I became to weak to continue.

Much of the time I could do little but read so I kept myself occupied by researching. Over the last few years I have read well over a hundred hard copy books on tools, workshops and organization. Then I sift the internet for all kinds of resources. After Google patents came online, I have spent an embarrassing amount of time combing through thousands of patents.

There are probably very few people in the world with my unique combination of focus on tool organization and the free time to do wide ranging research on all available solution. For example, in the last week, I have been reading through the thousands of pages of the Popular Mechanics Shop Notes from 1919-1921. According to the archive site, the book has only been downloaded less than 30 times. Most people just aren’t interested in the old but not old enough to be antique sort of stuff.

I have become something of an amateur academic in the field of workshop solutions both current and historical. Although, I have conversed with many people with greater depth of knowledge in this or that subarea, I have yet to meet anyone, even online, who can match the breadth of my own research.

I telling you all this to impress upon you that I believe I can honestly say that my opinion of your design carries more weight than almost anyone else. When I, personally, state that you have a unique and significant solution, I not just someone off the street saying, “that’s so cool dude!” I am saying that out of the literal thousands of solutions I have studied, this one one really stands out.

The closest existing idea would be the sewing screen dating from the Victorian era but even that is relatively limited compared to your more compact solution.

Your idea has a broad range of applications beyond tools. Anything that people hang on pegboard could be stored in the Vagabond rack. For example, just recently, a lot computer geeks have figured out that they could neaten their desk and gadgets by wiring hard drives, modems, routers, card readers etc. to pegboard and hanging it under or behind their desk. Combine that idea with the Vagabond tool rack and you have an easily transportable/protected device array.

I completely understand you reluctance to go the traditional route of getting a patent and finding a manufacturer. It’s time consuming and expensive up front plus you stand a significant chance of getting ripped off when the lawyers get involved.

However, today you don’t have to go the traditional route. This idea seems custom made for a company/service like Quirky. I think they would pounce on this idea and you could get it developed and marketed for nothing. The return will be less, of course but so is the investment.

You could also try something like Kickstarter or a custom manufacturing service like Ponko.

So, I urge you to develop the idea formally and get it out there. If you choose not do so, it would help others if you were to explicitly place it in the public domain via one of the open source licenses. Making an Instructable, as mentioned above, automatically attaches such a license. If you like, I can make the Instructable for you showing due credit.

Whatever you choose, do act upon this idea. One way or the other, this idea needs to get out there. Feel free to contact me through my email (which wordpress should provide you via your admin tools) if you wish to discuss this further.

I do have a few inventions that I think are really clever and have held back to perhaps make a few bucks off of. I do in a way feel a bit guilty for not sharing them, but I too think that would be nice to make a bit of money off of my research and ideas.

I am going to try and start up a conversation with yet another company next week. One of the inventions that I have been working on was missing a key component. The resulting product would be something that I would not dream of making a tool kit without including. However one critical component was missing from this tool. I have now found a very new product that satisfies that the need and as a result I have made my new tool. I plan to immediately make myself at least four more of them. It is a dream, and every bit as good as I expected. Sadly for me, this invention is fairly easily reproduced and their product is key to it’s being as nice as it is. Humorously, the parts to this invention in various prototypes are scattered through my blog, but as the components are useful on their own or in combination with other tools, the concept is quite well concealed.

Bob

I have been looking for months for a good tool management solution that was both neat, compact, portable yet easy to get tools out off. As part of my search, I developed the habit of surfing Google patents just to see what people are thinking up and in particular of late I have been looking at toolboxes, tool organizers, workbenches etc and I haven’t seen anything half this creative out of the hundreds of related patents I have examined. All the other ideas boil down to variations of “box”, “tray” and “pouch”. This idea really stands out.

This could be a very viable product if it was converted to plastic and mass marketed.

I suppose mass markets aren’t really your cup of tea but (1) good people should be financially rewarded for good ideas so they will have the resources to produce good ideas and (2) there are tens of thousands of people out there in the world who would benefit from a neat, inexpensive and very effective solution like this.

I mean, I plan on making several of my own but it would have been great to snag one for $10 bucks at Home Depot a few years ago. If you want to do good on a large scale, you got to go corporate big.