Our journey begins in Wright, Wyoming - where after finishing his diesel tech program, Tommy Mills began working for a local repair shop. On one job in particular, Tommy needed to access a transmission coolant line;
“If you don’t have the right tool, you do what any ranch kid would do. You improvise,” he said. “And when you improvise, it sometimes leads to disaster…I used a pair of pliers. I got it off, but the fastener was no longer usable. I got a butt chewing so bad because I used the wrong tool and ruined the line. My boss had to pay for it. “
The next time the tool vendor came to his repair shop, Tommy immediately approached the vendor to ask for a ratcheting flare nut wrench. “... he looked at me like a dog hearing a high-pitched whistle. He turned his head and said there’s nothing like that out there. It doesn’t exist.”
Tommy continued to think and talk about the nonexistent wrench, and one day his dad asked him to help hook a pickup onto a gooseneck trailer, and there in the back of the pickup was a B&W hitch with a turnover ball.
“A light bulb went on,” Tommy said, realizing that someone had to invent the specialized device. So he Googled B&W and put in a call to Roger Baker, one of the company founders, to ask him about the patent process, and to his surprise, Baker took the call and answered Tommy’s questions on the patent process.
“There’s no reason I should have been able to talk to the founder of a multimillion-dollar company, so I acknowledge God’s hand in all of this,” Tommy says.
The Beginning of a Partnership
Growing up near Wright, Tommy didn’t know Kendall Bertagnole, but he knew his dad, Karl, a successful businessman and rancher. Karl asked Tommy if he would clean up a farm he had purchased near Manderson and get it back into operation. Mills accepted and moved across the Big Horns in August of 2013 to take the job.
The first time Tommy met Kendall Bertagnole, the two were part of a group of young men who took Kendall’s sister’s fiancé on a s***t and trap shooting excursion near Buffalo. Tommy sat next to Kendall while he drove and others in the party slept, and during that trip he discovered that Kendall was a project manager for an electrical company in Casper, using computer aided drafting to draft blueprints and make sure electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems worked together. The idea of the wrench popped into his head, and Tommy said “I need CAD expertise,” Kendall was very intrigued.
The two scribbled out a design on the floor of Tommys’ shop and decided, “We can start this process. We can do this. We sat in front of the computer and started the drafting process.”
Drafting Professor Said It Couldn’t Be Done
The duo contacted an attorney about non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and performed a basic patent search through the University of Wyoming. There were a few designs found but nothing with the technology Tommy and Kendall had created.
Meanwhile, Kendall worked through most of the design process for the wrench but found a particular design feature that he couldn’t master. He reached out, but a Casper College drafting professor said it couldn’t be done.
Bertagnole didn’t buy it, but then moved to take a new job in Spokane. As the head of a company’s new drafting and design department, he needed some drafting software, and the Autodesk Company sent Jay Ayala to implement the new software. At the end of the process, Ayala asked if there was anything else he could do for Kendall.
The wrench popped into Kendall’s mind, and he asked Jay if he would sign an NDA and help him with the final design. He said he had to get back to Portland but would get back to him. Two weeks later, he returned to Spokane, signed the NDA and in five minutes had solved the final design conundrum – in a hotel lobby.
Kendall called Tommy saying, ‘We need this guy on our team,’ and he agreed. A three-man partnership was formed. Ayala designed the model on his computer and as Tommy states, “what you see today is exactly what was in my mind. Jay brought that to fruition.”
American Made. American Steel.
Each wrench we make is created in the heartland of manufacturing in the U.S.A. We source locally made steel from people we know and trust.
Getting The Job Done Right - The First Time.
We want to empower every person using our tool to be able to get the job done right, the first time. Our team strives daily to bring quality and value into every part of our work; and we want that to show in our wrenches.
Time Is Valuable
We know your time is valuable - for most mechanics, time is money. We want to provide a wrench that makes your job go smoother, and faster - saving you time, and in situations like Tommy Mills - money.
