Creative Spark

I’ve always been fascinated by situations that create the spark of innovation. In the case of Melvin Forbes, a mold maker, part-time gunsmith, and shop teacher from West Virginia whom Richard Mann profiled in SHOT Business last year, it was the desire to create a lightweight bolt-action hunting rifle, or as Mann put it, “a bolt-action sporting rifle that would weigh about five pounds, but shoot like it weighed 10.”  Like many visionaries, he was thought to be a bit touched, but his invention set “the bar high for synthetic-stocked, ultra-light, bolt-action sporting rifles.” Nearly 40 years later, it’s still the rifle against which all other pretenders to the throne are measured.

As for Justin Sitz, CEO/Founder of Versacarry (the subject of Five Minutes With), the spark that led to the creation of his first concealed-carry holster was a fire that destroyed his house and all his belongings. Now, for most people, when your house burns to the ground, taking everything you own with it, your first impulse naturally would be to get started on a rebuild. Sitz took a different path; his first step after the fire was a handgun, a purchase that got him thinking about concealed-carry holsters. That, in turn, inspired him to design and patent the Zerobulk holster. The holster jump-started his company, and he now runs a successful Texas-based enterprise that manufactures a wide variety of concealed-carry holsters as well as carry belts and magazine pouches.

For Rob Gearing, an animated, straight-talking Brit, the creative spark ignited because of his frustration of hunting with a fixed bipod. Though employed in the British aerospace industry, he moonlighted as a ghillie, one who preferred to carry as little gear as possible. “When you’re wired that way…you are thinking about how to shave bits of weight where you can without sacrificing performance,” he says. “My DNA is to find elegant solutions to problems.”

As you’ll learn in Andrew McKean’s illuminating profile (see feature item) of Gearing and his company, Spartan Precision Equipment, that kind of thinking inspired the creation of the lightweight Javelin Bipod, a unique detachable bipod that utilized super-strong, super-small magnets that allowed a hunter to easily and quickly attach and detach the bipod to a rifle.

“The little bipod was a very simple little Walter Mitty thing, a couple of moving legs and the magnet, but I shot quite a lot of deer off that thing,” says Gearing. “I figured this thing has legs—excuse the pun. I can’t be the only person who gets frustrated with keeping a bipod on a rifle full-time.”

That’s where the SHOT Show came in, with a serendipitous encounter at the Primos booth. Starting this fall, Primos’ signature Trigger Stick Apex tripods will be available with Spartan’s patented magnetic attachment system. A new Primos gun-mounted bipod that features the same Spartan technology will also be available this fall.

I was once told, after a successful big-game hunt, that “luck is the result of preparation meeting opportunity.” What’s true in hunting is also true in manufacturing.