Michael Young – This young man, motivated by innovation, designed a framing hammer solution that firmly sits between your traditional hammer and nail gun.
The Auto Hammer allows you to load a collated nail set and disperses a single nail with a simple push of a button. There is a safety switch to prevent injury and loading sets seems to be pretty simple.
This hammer is meant to be a replacement of the traditional hammer as we have nail guns to do the job. It’s ideal to use the Auto Hammer if you just need to drive a few nails when the nail gun is inaccessible.
It’s been an unfortunate, uphill battle for Michael and the Auto Hammer for the past 6 years. Here is a short summary on his coroflot page:
My mad scientist project for the past six years. Came up with the idea and just couldn’t put it down until I figured it out. 11 completely unique functional variations later I got it to work in a cost effective, manufacturable, and marketable form! I wrote the patent myself (and had a lawyer fix it) and then set out to sell it. The team at Fiskars showed extreme interest and said it was the best idea they’d ever have come in, though ultimately it was too complex for their product offering. Next was Craftsman who offered me a large sum to purchase the idea. Unfortunately it was in the middle of their company being purchased by Sears, their department dramatically shrunk right after our initial deal, people that I was working with left the company, and the deal slowly eroded with their bandwidth to take on new projects. At the end of it my provisional patent has expired and I let it go. Glad to have tried and succeeded in many ways, here’s to the next one!
We hope that Michael can catch a break and someone would be interested in picking up his idea. Until then, we hope Michael continues to innovate and work towards several other solutions, especially for the job sites.
What do you think of the Auto Hammer? Should a manufacturer add this to their line up? If so, which brand would look best? Let us know what you think.