ARTICLE - TURNING IDEAS INTO SUCCESSES

TURNING IDEAS INTO A STRING OF SUCCESSES
(Ottawa Citizen) - By Richard Starnes

Gary Troke’s imagination has been a breeding ground of invention for more than 35 years

OTTAWA — If you spent a little time with Gary Troke, you might swear there was a buzzing sound coming from his brain. There isn’t, of course, but there should be.

Troke is an inventor, an industrial equipment designer, an entrepreneur who has been filtering endless ideas for more than 35 years, parlaying some of them into a string of successes.

“Ideas just flow from me,” he says on the drive from the Perth factory and research centre for Stonemaker, his most recent invention, to his home overlooking the water outside Westport.

“I get five or six or seven a day and it used to drive me crazy. I tell you … I do a lot of patent searches on a lot of things.” He offers an example. “It comes to me in the middle of the night. I have a solution to how we can get rid of small arms around the world. Now, of course, I can’t sleep.”

This time, Troke envisaged developing a form of thermite — a mix of metal powder and metal oxide — that mimics gunpowder and using it to create a virus in the AK munitions supply around the world. Thermite in small arms effectively destroys them.

This idea has come to nothing, although it is rumoured to be a key component of an upcoming movie script.

However, Troke has had his share of major successes. It all began when the body-shop manager was in his mid-30s.

He was always a tinkerer, so, when weeds started to encroach on the shoreline of the family’s Otty Lake cottage, he decided action was necessary. The inventor was born.

He designed a V-knife, curved at the end, that ran along the lake bottom and sheared the weeds. It worked well, but he had much grander ideas.

He needed a small, floating harvester that could cut channels through weeds, collecting the cuttings as it went and off-loading them at appropriate spots. He wanted a single-operator design able to easily move through narrow channels if necessary.

With this in his head and carrying an artist’s impression, he approached the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority. Wouldn’t work, he was told. Undeterred by the rebuff, he began to build one in a barn using $5,000 he had borrowed. Before long he had built and sold four or five.

Then he got media interest, calls from as far away as Florida and Michigan. So he built more — some five metres long, others 15 metres — and drove them to buyers across North America. His harvester became a regular sight on Ottawa’s Rideau Canal. The Weed Harvester was born.

At this time — 1981 — Kenting Earth Sciences, an international surveying company based in Ottawa, had been awarded an Egyptian government contract to complete a hydrographic survey of the River Nile from the Aswân Dam to the Mediterranean. The trouble was that massive weeds were choking off the transponders Kenting needed, and the company had to have a solution fast.

It had read of the harvester, so Kenting turned to Troke, who flew to Cairo with the components of a machine, supervised assembly and trained operators.

The harvester was a huge success, solving Kenting’s problem and so impressing the Egyptian government that it signed a contract for Troke to supply 44 harvesters to cut away weeds threatening to choke its waterways.

This, however, was only the beginning for Troke and his family. The entrepreneurial spirit flows powerfully here.

Passementerie is the art of making elaborate trimmings using coloured silk, braid, gold or silver cord and embroidery. When Troke discovered that curtain tie-backs costing $2 in Egypt could be sold for $80 in the United States, he sent samples to his daughter Denise, who was attending university in Charleston, South Carolina.

When she took them to an Atlanta store, she won a $78,000 U.S. order. That led to the opening of a factory in Cairo and, eventually, passing on international distributor rights to an Atlanta businessman. Troke developed methods to automate some of the skills associated with passementerie, which had been handmade for more than 1,000 years.

It was 2002 that the latest, longest-running Troke invention started to take shape. He was living in Egypt at the time, but decided to build a family retreat near Westport. In part, it involved putting in roads of interlocking pavers, but Troke balked when he discovered how much it would cost. So he invented his own on-site paver machine.

“I got the machine down to one paver every 10.1 seconds,” he says. “But it only made eight-inch pavers and I wanted more variety than that. You know, I’m a bit like the barber who always says he needs a haircut.”

It has been a long road since then. Troke established a factory in Cairo that was not a success. He shipped his early Stonemaker to back Canada and scrapped it because it didn’t do what he wanted.

Now, though, he likes to think he has invented a game-changer for the construction industry, a brick-making method that is eco-friendly and of enormous potential to the developing world.

This latest device uses aggregate, water and portland cement. The materials are fed in and agitated in a batch mixer before being moved into a compression chamber that produces bricks, blocks and pavers, which are then fed onto a belt at the end of the line. Wet mix is produced in much the same way, but without the brick compression.

It sounds simple, but developing Stonemaker has taken almost 10 years.

For the developed world, the Stonemaker claims to cut costs by as much as 90 per cent because it can produce as much as 180 square feet of stones and blocks in an hour in a wide variety of sizes, widths, colours and textures. Or, it can mix and kick out five cubic yards of wet concrete mix per hour on the construction site, operated by one person.

When Troke talks about the developing world, he likes to mention Afghanistan and Haiti as prime beneficiaries of his invention.

In Afghanistan, for example, Stonemaker could be brought into remote villages to produce solid building blocks for homes and schools.

In earthquake-stricken Haiti, many streets are still littered with rubble from fallen buildings. That material can be fed into one end of a Stonemaker, which has a powerful agitator capable of breaking it back down into aggregate that goes to make new building blocks.

Some countries may only have available indigenous materials such as mud. Troke continues to work on producing blocks strong enough for building using just that.