Two-Piece Design Adds Flexability to Hex Wrench

Jim Ruff was tired of shearing off the corners of his hex wrenches and stripping bolts. So the owner of Ruff Machine Shop in Harrison decided to put more flex in the hex wrench.

In 2003, Jim Ruff designed a hex wrench using two pieces of metal held together with Vulkan Torflex rubber. The industrial rubber allows the business end of the six-sided wrench to flex and thus shift the stress when torque is applied to loosen a bolt.

“This tool allows you to put more pressure on without stripping out the bolt or rounding off the hex key,” said Travis Ruff of Springdale, Jim’s son. “It’s a dual-action hex key because the top half moves differently from the bottom half.”

“I used to be a tool and die maker,” Jim Ruff said. “It’s just something I’ve always seen that you need. Allen head bolts will twist out on you. It’s always a problem. With this cam-type action [in the Black Widow Tool], it actually expands the size of the tool in there. It’s one of the best items I’ve ever seen as far as Allen wrenches.”

Travis Ruff plans to market the hex wrench to national tool companies. The wrench his father designed was black with a red rubber dot on the back. Since it resembled a black widow spider, they named the company Black Widow Tools.

Travis Ruff had 40 prototype wrenches made by a Chinese company. The prototypes are stainless steel with black rubber. But they plan for the tools to be manufactured in black and red.

Winning Awards

Travis Ruff was a student last spring in Carol Reeves’ class on entrepreneurship in the University of Arkansas’ Walton College of Business.

For a class project, Ruff and three other students decided to market the Black Widow hex wrench.

Their business plan won the top Governor’s Entrepreneurial Development Award for graduate students, which also netted them $20,000. They also took second place and $10,000 in the 2004 Rice University Business Plan Competition. Carnegie Mellon University won first place with a plan to use Radio fequency indentification technology to keep track of inventory in hospitals. The Black Widow put the hex on high-tech teams from Harvard and UCLA, among others.

“We came in with a simple tool that has been around for 100 years, and we beat them,” Travis Ruff said.

The other team members — John Rutledge of Searcy, Levi Russ of Bentonville and Meagan Crews of Houston, Texas — have gone on to other jobs, leaving Travis Ruff holding the hex wrench.

Reeves said the team’s success prompted several students to take her class, The Partnering Project, this semester. Four years ago, three of the Walton College’s MBA students enrolled in the class. This semester, 16 of the 50 MBA students are taking it.

“It has just been a tremendous impact on our entrepreneurial class,” Reeves said. “It makes a lot of people consider entrepreneurship who wouldn’t have considered it before.”

This semester, Reeves has six student groups: two working on nanotechnology, one doing a turboscreen for railroad train engines, one working on a water filtration system, one working on software to assist retail vendors and one working on a product to improve the electric guitar.

The hex wrench may have been around for a century, but Jim Ruff’s modification is the first change in the wrench since a ball end was invented in the 1960s. With the ball end, the wrench can be used to reach bolts from an angle when room doesn’t allow for it to be used in the usual manner.

Travis Ruff said he has a patent on the Black Widow wrench, but he’s “refining it” before he begins a major push to market it. Because of its design, the Black Widow hex key will probably be made in the one-quarter to one-half-inch size range. Ruff said Danaher Corp. and The Stanley Works both have offices in the area, implying he might pitch the Black Widow to representatives of those companies.

Ruff Going

Since earning an MBA from the UA in May, Travis Ruff has started two companies.

With Sam Hollis, former vice president of Oakridge Builders in Springdale, Travis Ruff launched Milestone Construction in November. They hope the Springdale-based commercial construction company will bring in $5 million in revenue its first year.

“I’m doing the marketing, doing some financial stuff, but mainly I’m an investor in it,” Travis Ruff said.

Also, with John James of Farmington, Travis Ruff is starting a company that will help nonprofit organizations sell things on eBay to raise money. The company, Venture Publishing, has two churches set up to test the plan in February.

“There are a lot of eBay consignment businesses out there,” Travis Ruff said, “but we don’t know of any others doing it for nonprofits.”

Travis Ruff has the background for an Internet business. He served as head of e-commerce for American Freightways of Harrison, which was purchased by Federal Express in 2000. He spent nine and a half years with the company.