Only you I suspect would discount a NIOSH/Face recommendation BB.
My motivations on this matter are many and complex.
When I invented and patented my chipper safety gate I was motivated by my firsthand experience using them as a removal expert and recognizing their inherent danger to the operator. They basically scared the crap out of me right off the bat. I spent alot of money both on the patent and research. I had high hopes of my invention being licensed for use by a major manufacturer and sent packages out to all of them offering the standard royalty of 7 percent net on each unit sold. After many weeks each of them got back to me politely declining my offer with no explanation why.
After a year or so of repeated attempts to find out why I was being stonewalled on such a vital safety device, an extremely knowledgeable high placed executive in the tree industry had mercy on me and would explain why I was being turned down by every manufacturer if I kept his name confidential and promised not to ever reveal it, which I did.
As things stood at that time if a chipper operator was sucked into one of their chippers, the company could claim gross negligence on the operator's part and very effectively limit the company's liability in court. But if the company used my invention and an operator was eaten for whatever reason, the company's liability would go up, possibly substantially if my invention malfunctioned for any reason. It basically boiled down to a corporation's wish to maintain their limited liability status even if it cost a few dozen operator's lives to do so. The cold hard facts that corporations are governed by.
I accepted it and moved on despite it's amoral rationale. But a few years later a friend of mine that had been one of my favorite groundmen was eaten alive while feeding an 1800 alone at a company I had been general foreman of for many years, though I had quit the company a few years prior to my friends death there.
That's when real anger began to motivate me. I had purposely let my patent expire in the vain hope these manufacturers would implement my patent due to the growing numbers and frequencies of deaths using their chippers.
Each time an operator died my phone would ring a few months later, it was attornies who had tracked me down through the patent office wanting me to testify in court on behalf of their clients family. They wanted me to testify about my dealings with whatever manufacturer was involved with the case. At first I turned them all down and kept out of it due to my dislike of both attornies and suing people.
But after my friend died while chipping alone my attitude changed and I began to co-operate in cases I was convinced did not involve gross negligence on the dead operator's part. I've only participated in three such cases to date. But I have every intention of participating in every new case in which I'm convinced by the forensic evidence and witness accounts that the operator was not at fault.
Mather's patent was issued to him at almost the same time my friend died in 2001, and listed my inactive patent as a reference to his in the number one slot.
My true motivations on this matter haven't really changed very much over the intervening years, but they have hardened into a visceral disgust with manufacturers unwilling to put human safety very high on their corporate to do list.
jomoco
