If you listen closely, you may hear a small buzzing sound coming from Gary Troke’s head. Okay, so maybe not. It should, though. Troke is always inventing, and he has been doing so for over 35 years now, reports Ottawa Citizen.
“Ideas just flow from me,†he says on the drive from the Perth factory and research centre for Stonemaker, his most recent invention, to his home overlooking the water outside Westport.
“I get five or six or seven a day and it used to drive me crazy. I tell you … I do a lot of patent searches on a lot of things.†He offers an example. “It comes to me in the middle of the night. I have a solution to how we can get rid of small arms around the world. Now, of course, I can’t sleep.â€
He was always a tinkerer, so, when weeds started to encroach on the shoreline of the family’s Otty Lake cottage, he decided action was necessary. The inventor was born.
He needed a small, floating harvester that could cut channels through weeds, collecting the cuttings as it went and off-loading them at appropriate spots. He wanted a single-operator design able to easily move through narrow channels if necessary.
With this in his head and carrying an artist’s impression, he approached the Rideau Valley Conservation Authority. Wouldn’t work, he was told. Undeterred by the rebuff, he began to build one in a barn using $5,000 he had borrowed. Before long he had built and sold four or five.
Then he got media interest, calls from as far away as Florida and Michigan. So he built more — some five metres long, others 15 metres — and drove them to buyers across North America. His harvester became a regular sight on Ottawa’s Rideau Canal. The Weed Harvester was born.
Photo by Dominic Alves