From 1969-1977 was a motorcycle Enduro rider on Pentons, KTMs, Can-Ams, Hercules, Ossa, and Rokon motorcycles. I absolutely loved racing in these long events thru the mud, rocks, hills, streams, you name it, they ran us thru it. But I had a problem when it was cold, my hands would get very cold, and the only way I could keep riding when it got raining and nasty was to put my hand on the bike's exhaust pipe while I rode. Of course this was only possible in the woods on the clutch side. On the throttle side I did it only when I was on a section of road, not in the woods. Most riders did it that way. They would reach over and operate the throttle with the left hand, and the right hand could be put down on the side of the engine fins. It was kind of goofy looking, a convoy of riders all covered in mud riding in single file up the road with their hands on the engine fins. I had a few thoughts on how to keep my hands warm, some really stupid like running some of the exhaust into a port in the center of the handlebars so the hot exhaust could travel thru them and out the ends. But of course this would get in your face and you'd choke from it and that wouldn't work very well in the slow tight woods. So I tried cartridge heaters to warm hands in 1976 at the Austria ISDT where they helped to keep my hands warm in the rain and high altitude mountains. I was given a lot of ribbing about having wires coming out from under my grips. Carl Cranke was quoted in the motorcycle press that he had asked me how I was going to run such a long extension cord with me during the race. The same small electrical power that fed the headlight could be switched over to the special 6 volt heating cartridges. We had to have working headlight and taillight in these Qualifier races so I had a 3-position switch to change function to operate the headlights when required. The ISDT is a 6 day long motorcycle endurance event that often takes you into cold conditions, even snow at times in the higher elevations. From 1976 thru 1980 I spent thousands of hours (really, still have the 7 spiral notebooks in my office. I am kind of an obsessive type of personality) working on various approaches to the problem. After cartridge heaters I tried printed resistance circuits under the grips but too much of the heat is lost to the handlebars which act like a heat sink, especially with the thick Italian Gran Turismo grips of that era. Then I studied the various resistance wires available (there are hundreds of alloys with different characteristics). Using the library, and Ohm's Law I thoroughly understood what was needed and also understood "watt-density" which is a very important factor you need to control so as to not melt the rubber around the resistance wire where the rubber has intimate contact with the wire. Too small of a wire and the watt density is very high.(length of wire multiplied by the circumference of the wire and it's relationship to the wattage.) Or if the watt density is too low then you won't feel the heat in severe conditions like in the rain, in colder temperatures, when driving faster, etc. Ohm's Law formulas are actually a link on our website. I had raced endurance motorcycle events for 9 years, and knee injuries and surgeries eventually put an end to it, so I decided I wanted to be a mechanical engineer and went to a 4 yr. program at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. I had a civil engineering course in my 2nd year where we were spending a lot of time learning mechanical drafting techniques. The professor had a homework assignment for all students to submit the various 2D and 3D angled views of a piece of furniture. I asked the professor if I could demonstrate the same skills with drawings of a heated grip I had long been contemplating, and he said OK. I really went to work on details and got to a point where I felt I could actually think (unreasonably) to manufacture them. The next step was to take a machine shop course where you get to learn how to run milling machines, lathes, surface grinders, ID-OD grinders, etc. I loved this course, and when given the opportunity to do something on my own, I chose to make a single cavity mold to create a heating element cylinder, to begin the process of making a heated handgrip. I studied injection molds at the library, and learned a great deal more about thermal expansion, injection molding machines. This went on so much that I was working 14-18 hours a day on it 24/7. The machine shop professor was extremely encouraging and allowed me to come to the machine shop between my classes to continue work on the mold cavity set and the cores. This went on for many many months. Next was a visit to the Chemical Engineering Dept. at UMASS where they had a small vertical-clamp injection molding machine that wasn't for production but demonstrated the principles of injection molding. I spoke at length with the senior student in charge of the injection molding lab, and he invited me to bring my crude mold in to see if I could actually mold something. It took a lot of adjustments and experimentation in the machine shop but eventually I was able to mold the inner heating elements of the heated grip. The inner heating element of the heated grip was the biggest challenge because I needed to have a 6 foot long resistance wire trapped in one position while the very high injection pressure shot melted polymer into the mold. The pressures were very high and they would push the coil all to the opposite end of the cavity during the process. So I had to engineer a means of "capturing" the coil in one position while the high pressure shot inside. I spent so much time at that sample injection molding machine that the senior student in charge of the lab spoke to his professor and got the OK to give me a key to the lab, so I could come in there at any hour of the night to work on solving problems. The solution involved a very accurate pinching technique where the coil was held in one position from both inside and outside while having flow passages everywhere to trap it in position. It worked great, and the next step was making a universally acceptable heated grip outer shape. This kind of expertise was beyond my training at that point, so I went to many toolmakers in the industry until I found one that shared my excitement with the project and he gave me a reasonable price to make a professional aluminum prototype mold, one for the inner heating element and the other for the outer grip, with steel cores. $5000. was the price and that was a big amount in 1980, more than an automobile. The only way I could afford to do it was if I could pre-sell the product before it was even manufactured. Fortunately I had a very good relationship with the president and the staff of the motorcycle company I had previously raced for. And I knew all of the top endurance racers very well too. I took an OURY motocross grip and learned how to make a plaster-of-Paris mold of the grip, both halves, and eventually I got one made that did not have air bubbles trapped at the surface, good enough for a working prototype that could be used on a motorcycle. I contacted the OURY grip molding factory out in the western USA and spoke at length with the owner Bill Oury. I also contacted Preston Petty Products in Oregon. I knew him from the ISDT qualifier events which were used to select members of the annual US team that got to go to Europe to compete in the ISDT. I had visited his factory when I raced once out in Oregon at a Qualifier event, and he certainly had the machines and know-how for it, as he was molding unbreakable fenders, grips, work tubs, number plates, headlights, KTM engine cases, all injection molded plastic. Although both business owners considered my proposal, neither of them was ultimately willing to commit to the tooling costs. So I was on my own, and had to figure out how to convince them it was going to work great and was a really needed product in the motorcycle world. At this point I was making hand-produced grips in my dormitory room, at 3+ hours each grip. That's a story in itself. I hand-molded them in this very long process by using a prototype material called Devcon Flexane®, a mixable rubber-like material that could be flowed into my crude grip mold to form the rubber part of the grip. Off on a time-tangent: This was my second 4 years at college, I already had a 4 yr. degree in Psychology which I had done nothing with since I went directly into racing when I got that '72 degree. I actually chose to miss my college graduation so I could go to race in a 2-day enduro in New England. This turned out to be a very good weekend for me. At that event on the 2nd day I seized my 1971 Penton 125cc engine while on a road section, and was sitting on the side of a road with my bike all spread out on the grass in pieces. Nearly within sight of a race security checkpoint that led back into the woods. I had used my leather-pack carried tools to disassemble the exhaust pipe, carb, cylinder head, cylinder, piston and rings, etc. My only chance was to get that piston unseized and put it back together. I didn't know enough about 2-stroke engines at the time to understand that it was not going to happen. The aluminum piston was scored into the cylinder bore - it was hopeless. Anyway, who should stop by to offer help to me but John Penton in a stealth Ford Maverick. He said he didn't think he had any piston and rings in his car trunk, but if he could get hold of what I needed he'd bring them back to me. He never made it back, so after I was over my late maximum of 1 hour I put the bike together and got a ride back to the campground. By then, I was fairly miserable because I had a broken motorcycle, it was raining, I was very cold and changing clothes in my 2-man pup tent. I was putting my stuff together to drive home when John's son Jack Penton (one of the dozen or so stars of the US Enduro world at the time). He asked if I could come over to their camp as his Dad wanted to speak to me. John Penton asked me what I was doing with my life and invited me to drive to Ohio with my broken motorcycle, where I could get it fixed properly and perhaps work there at Penton Imports. I was stupified at my good fortune, apparently he was impressed by my tenacity at disassembling my bike during the event. When I trailered my bike out to Ohio in my 1964 2-stroke Saab station wagon, I was quite a sight. I pulled behind my broken 125cc bike behind the rear bumper on it's rear tire with the chain removed. The front wheel tied into the rear seat and the rear hatch door was tied to the bike. I got a job sanding down ex-race bike frames at $2.75/ hour and was fooling around with different ideas in the after-work hours. I lived at no cost in John Penton's small duplex that he owned at the rear of his home property in Amherst, OH. I remember I shared the place for a time with Billy Uhl, another of the Enduro and ISDT stars of that time period. This was the early time of the 2nd generation called the CMF Pentons (CMF standing for Chrome Moly Frames back then). The early CMF bikes did not have the amazingly effective frame-backbone air intakes that the first generation with the rounded tanks had. While I was there I talked one of their temporary young engineers into building a prototype CMF bike with a "frame breather" backbone. I remember taking it one very rainy day to a river and testing it to see how deep it could stay running. I didn't last very long sanding bike frames and doing that kind of work, and soon got into a personality conflict with John's brother Ted Penton, who invited me to go home. He did it without talking to his brother John, who got mad about it happening without his knowledge, and John called me at home afterwards and apologized. I continued to race the Penton 125cc that summer and John Penton arranged for me to go to Czechoslovakia to the ISDT that September of '72, riding as a Canadian. I ended up visiting the KTM factory where they built the Penton motorcycles, although at that time most of their production was pedal-bicycles. They had not yet changed the Penton cycles into KTMs. I honored his faith in me by staying on a Gold Medal pace until the final 3 hours of the 6th day, when my stock (non-teflon lined) throttle cable got too much dirty water into it and I lost 15 minutes changing it at a checkpoint. I can remember Al Eames was there at the checkpoint, in the rain, telling me he couldn't provide any assistance to me or I'd be disqualified. Al Eames was responsible for the ISDT in 1973 coming tot he USA, held in Dalton, MA. My hands were so numb that I was having trouble engaging the lower throttle cable end into the throttle slide. Fortunately a KTM man was there from the Austria factory and he told me I didn't need to install the flat washer plate over the cable end, since I had lost it in the mud while struggling with it. I ended up with a Silver medal in my first Six-Days event. I went on to become a member of the USA ISDT team for the following 4 years. Several years later when I switched to the automatic Rokon 340cc motorcycles I talked their engineer into making a prototype "frame-breather" Rokon for me to campaign in Enduros and the ISDT Qualifiers. He modified their round backbone tube with a series of holes, and tied in the air-box without leakage into the end of that backbone tube under the seat. My time at Rokon could make this already long writing into a small book, so I'll leave it at that. Rokon ultimately went bankrupt and sold off piece at a time at public auction in 1978, where I bought ten partially built 2-wheel drive Trailbreaker® machines, bought the missing parts to make whole machines, sold them and raised enough money help pay for engineering school at UMASS. Back in 1977 when I started the 4 yr. program my semester tuition for an in-state resident was $400. That'll never happen again, unless you go to Cooper Union in NYC or get great scholarships. (All students at Cooper Union pay no tuition even in 2009) Molding the grip was a huge challenge for me. Here I was living in a dormitory room at the University, and had a small single corner room on the 4th floor. It was the dormitory used for all graduate students and foreign students. I needed a vacuum chamber. I figured out a method of using a 8" diameter x 12" long piece of scrap-steel water-pipe I found in a junkyard, and brought it to the machine shop to lathe cut it to having precisely flat ends. I was still welcome at the machine shop thankfully. I also obtained two 3/4" thick pieces of Lexan polycarbonate that I machined to accurately close off both ends of the machined water-pipe. I then machined a steel chamber with a valve to introduce "mixed synthetic rubber" into the crude grip mold that was hung suspended in the center of my pipe-chamber. I installed a fitting into the pipe to enable me to draw the air out of the chamber using a vacuum pump. Now I couldn't afford sophisticated equipment like that, so I took the compressor out of an old refrigerator and used it in reverse to suck the air out of the chamber. I also used the same arrangement the normal way to create a pressurized container of air in an old Freon R12 refrigerant container. Fortunately I had no room-mate in the dormitory or I never would have gotten away with all of this apparatus. I would hand mix the 2-part Flexane rubber and put the mixed material in the vacuum chamber and suck out all of the air. This would cause all entrapped air in the mixture to bubble to the surface and pop, so the Flexane would be bubble-free. I took one of my pre-molded heating elements from the school injection molding lab, a cylindrical form that would be placed on a core mandrel inside the OURY outer plaster-of-Paris mold. Then I mounted the suspended mold in the chamber and refitted the Lexan ends, sealing them with Vaseline to prevent leakage. I drew a vacuum again on the chamber. I attached the chamber of mixed bubble-free Flexane rubber onto the top of the chamber, and opened the valve. The Flexane would get quickly sucked into the mold and when it started oozing out the edge of the mold I knew it was filled. I'd shut off the valve before any air got sucked in, and allowed this to cure for 2 hours. When I took it all apart, I had a finished "injection-molded" grip in the shape of an OURY motocross grip. I documented everything I did all along this multi-year period at the University in spiral bound notebooks, complete with detailed colorful sketches on most pages to visualize what I was doing. I had become a very good mechanical draftsman from my engineering classes, which turned out to serve me well in future years, as 25 years later I had a fully outfitted CNC machine shop. I stayed there during the summers so I could attend "summer classes" and be there to continue my work. I loved every minute of it, as the demands it made on me fit nicely with my obsessive nature. I took a course in Management, a course in Economics, a course in anything I needed to proceed with creating a small business. And to my surprise, there was not a single class professor that did not encourage me. Eventually I rarely went to my scheduled classes and simply worked on the grips in my 4th year. Most of the professors allowed me to obtain course credit for "Independent Study" as I would submit reports to them periodically on my progress. One class on employee management I wanted to attend, but rarely made it, missed many exams, and finally when the final exam was scheduled I went to the professor and explained to him why I missed so many classes and tests. He ended up giving me a passing grade of "D" in recognition of what I had accomplished with my new enterprise, and I never took that final exam. The University Fire Marshall got word of what I was doing in the dormitory and eventually I received a visit and was read the riot act over all the possible fire-hazard chemicals and boxes I had in my dormitory room. Yet, he was nice about it, and talked it over with the head overseer of the dorm. I was given an empty storage room to store my boxes and chemicals, and was given a key to it, and to the handicapped student elevator so I could bring the many boxes of materials up and down to my floor. By this time I was making hundreds of heated grips per night, as I did the injection molding at late hours so as to not interfere with other normal production molding that a local commercial shop operated. There was too much for me to do each day, so I hired students on my floor to help with 100% electrical quality control and visual inspection to sort out the rejects. And the reject rate was terrible ranging from 35% which was excellent to 85-90% which was very discouraging. I was determined to fill the order and meet that deadline. That first order of 2000 sets by the end of the year. I finished my 4th year without getting my Engineering degree but it didn't matter, because I was now in business, contacting motorcycle manufacturers and motorcycle parts distributors all over North America and Europe. And this was before the days of the reasonably priced fax machine, it was all by snail-mail. In 1982 and one other year I went back to the ISDT in Europe with lots of production heated grips and invited the whole US ISDT Team to fit them, though less than 10 took me up on it. They were probably right to not take a chance that their hands might get blisters using a new grip surface that they were not accustomed to. Consistent with the way the KTM factory looked at the ISDT, I took special care in manufacturing these grips, and they were all molded in a specially ordered white rubber material. One of the 2 years I was there with product, the top American rider at the Six-Days was a guy who went on to be the rider with the most ISDT rides ever: Jeff Fredette. That inspired me to run a congratulatory advertisement with a photo in the Trail Rider Magazine. But the $600. expense didn't result in a single sale, so for years later I did very little advertising. It has mostly been word of mouth selling, or a display in a wholesale distributor catalog. And now these days(2009) the Internet website helps to spread the product use.