Paving way with good inventions

Mario Salazar gambled his retirement savings and borrowed more than $60,000 on his credit cards in hopes that his digital miter gauge would attract enough attention at an Atlanta trade show to keep him out of bankruptcy.

"I thought that this was it. We (Salazar and his wife, Tia) had borrowed money from a bank to build prototypes of the tool but couldn't sell any of them because the software wasn't done to make them usable. Bankruptcy was in the back of our mind a lot," said Salazar, a Colorado Springs resident. "Failure was not an option. We were so far into this that we couldn't stop no matter how bleak it looked."

At the trade show, the 2006 International Woodworking Machine & Furniture Supply Fair, Salazar showed the miter gauge, which helps woodworkers make precise cuts, to Joe Turoff, a sales and marketing executive with Chervon North America Inc., a Chinese-owned supplier to retailing giant Sears and its Craftsman line of tools.

"After walking (through) the whole show, it was the coolest tool in the show. It was an interesting use of digital technology that I thought was quite marketable," Turoff said. "It is revolutionary because the design of the tool allows it to do two key functions with incredible accuracy."

After decades of tinkering, working in companies large and small and taking odd jobs to support his family, Salazar has finally hit it big. He sold a license about a year ago to Chervon, which is producing the miter gauge for Sears. It hit the shelves in January. The tool won Sears the Editor's Choice Award from Popular Mechanics magazine in April and will be featured in the August issue of the publication.

By the time Salazar, 44, had sold the license to Chevron, he had sunk $150,000 and six years into developing a tool he thought of when he was trying to build furniture for a fledgling business he had started. At the time, he couldn't find a miter gauge accurate enough to measure the cuts he wanted to make.

"I started building chairs and dining room tables, and the tool just didn't exist to achieve the level of accuracy to cut the wood to fit my designs," Salazar said. "In this case, necessity really was the mother of invention and I started doing research on how to build a tool like this."

Salazar had lost a job at a local hearing aid-manufacturing company and worked as a selfemployed contractor helping homeowners build decks, finish basements and complete landscaping projects to pay the bills while he launched his furnituremaking business.

"It was the blessing of my life," Salazar said, because the layoff allowed him to focus on his invention by refining its design, working with his wife and brother-in-law to develop the software to make it work, producing multiple prototypes and seeking a company that would license and produce it.

"It took 2½-3 years of (building) prototypes, and I didn't achieve the final version until 2007, which was the fourth-generation revision. There were continual upgrades and revisions to the software until we got it to the point where it worked the way I wanted it to work," Salazar said.

Salazar, who grew up in a single-parent family where his mother worked multiple jobs to support her five children in the Rio Grande Valley near the southern tip of Texas, believes he always had the ingredients to be an inventor. He was curious about how gadgets worked and always wanted to find out what was beyond the next horizon.

Salazar earned an associate's degree in electronics at Texas State Technical College in Harlingen. He began designing furniture while a student, a hobby that would later fuel his inventive urge.

He applied his technical skills in his first job as a technician for Lockheed Corp. (now Lockheed Martin Corp.) in Houston, working on several projects for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to be used on the International Space Station and the space shuttle. Co-workers say in a decade with Lockheed, Salazar developed several tools that helped him complete a task more quickly or accurately.

After meeting and marrying his wife, both later left for better opportunities with Motorola Corp. in Arizona as work with NASA was slowing. They worked two years on the Iridium network of satellites, which were built to provide satellite telephone service worldwide but ended up in bankruptcy in 1999 after $6 billion was spent on the network.

The end of the Iridium project prompted the couple to move to Colorado Springs.

While working on a landscaping project for David Churchill, general manager of Agilent Technologies Inc.'s operations in the Springs, Salazar said he found in Churchill the mentor he needed to turn his digital miter gauge from an idea to a marketable product.

"I had hired him to do landscaping, but after he finished I asked if he knew anyone who could build shelves in a circular room in my house and he said he could do that," Churchill said. "He told me, ‘What I really am is an inventor who happens to get income from a part-time job.' He wanted to bring electronics to woodworking, change how tools work and measures are made by using 21st-century technology."

Churchill coached Salazar on business practices and principles, answered Salazar's questions several times a month and read Salazar's business plan for Salazar Solutions, the company he created to develop and market the digital miter gauge and his other inventions.

"Mario has the ability to take technology and move from one market to another. That is really where his genius is - the ability to look at a different market and see solutions that are unique. It is a critical strength for him and very unusual," Churchill said. "He has so many good ideas that the best ones are the ones you least expect."

Chervon North America now makes the miter gauge for Sears, which sells a consumer version for $79.99 (Salazar Solutions sells a professional version for $400). After a slow initial rollout, Turoff said sales are picking up and are expected to grow more rapidly in the second half of the year.

Salazar also is developing a digital orthopedic instrument to measure bones for knee and hip replacements, a digital protractor that he said offers the capability of seven tools in one device, a digital robotic table saw and a chop saw, all of which he hopes to get licensed during the next year.

"If there is a need for technology in a certain market, you have to fill it as quickly as possible or someone else will," Salazar said. "I have thought about getting involved in energy conservation and nanotechnology because I always have about 10 products floating around in my head. My goal is to get three of them licensed a year."

Tia Salazar never doubts her husband will succeed.

"I've never seen anything he couldn't take on and accomplish," she said. "He built all the cabinets in our house. All I had to do was open a catalog, show him what I wanted and he built it. He has a special ability that is mind-boggling. He can look at something once and re-create it."

Salazar hopes to return to the Rio Grande Valley soon to encourage high school students to challenge themselves.

"You never know what you are capable of doing unless you try," Salazar said. "A wise old Mexican man told me that the person who knows how to do something may not achieve as much as the person who doesn't know how to do it but has the will to do it."

CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0234 or wayneh@gazette.com

PHILOSOPHY OF INVENTION

Salazar follows a simple philosophy that can be summed up in three sentences:

- Ignorance is bliss. Inventors must think nothing but positive thoughts about their inventions.

- How hard can it be? Inventors must believe they will be successful.

- You need passion. It's the catalyst for a successful invention.