QuickDraw
The QuickDraw Challenge: Once you use the QuickDraw tape measure, you will be faster and more accurate than anyone else on the jobsite.
My promise to you: Once you use the QuickDraw tape measure, you will be faster and more accurate than any one else on the jobsite. You will never waste time looking for a pencil or sharpener again. You will smile every time another carpenter asks you if they can try it, and where you got it.”
Dane Scarborough
The QuickDraw Story
I was in second grade when a kid challenged me to roll a quarter down the center of my face. He said “You can’t do it, it’s impossible!”. I took the quarter and proved him wrong, to which he replied “oh, I guess I was wrong”, and he walked away laughing. Unknown to me, he had rubbed pencil graphite on the edge of the quarter, so I was walking around with a black line down the center of my face. Flash forward to me building my house in the Sun Valley Idaho. It’s snowing, my ears are cold, my skin is dry, and countless pencils have already fallen from the perch on my ear, into snowdrifts, lost until spring for sure. I’m using a Stanley Power-lock tape measure to frame the second floor and I’ve just lost my last pencil. SOB#%^@#! So, I start using the edge of the tape case to indent the wood. This was the beginning of the idea that would eventually become the QUICKDRAW Pro marking tape measure.
Already being a successful inventor (I had growing success with the Levelution System Level), I knew I was on to something. I did patent searches, and discovered there were sixty plus, patents on the idea of marking tape measures, yet nothing was on the market? This was strange, because I knew firsthand that it was a great idea. I analyzed all the existing patents and discovered that they all had pretty much, the same flaws. Simply put, if you have to engage a marking mechanism, then lock the blade, use it, then dis-engage the marker, then dis-engage the lock, well, forget it, it’s easier to use a pencil, plus, the marker would still have to be sharpened, so that’s another problem, and there was also the issue of the parallax effect. Imagine an indicator over a tape blade. The indicator can’t be directly on/against the tape blade, because the blade can retract at high speed and both would damaged, so the indicator must be positioned some distance above the tape blade. It’s the gap between the indicator and the blade that causes the problem because if you are not exactly directly above the indicator, your measurement would be off. Try this: hold a paperclip above a tape blade and look at it from different angles. That’s the parallax effect problem.
So, I now knew why this great idea had never made it to market! For a marking tape to be better then using a pencil, it had to:
1. Be ready to mark without having to engage and dis-engage the marking device (this requirement eliminates the idea of using any kind of pencil).
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