In order to win over manufacturers, Fenelon had to test his invention seven ways to Sunday.
Paul Fenelon found a fortune buried inside the door of his Lincoln Town Car.
"It's hard to walk into a building and show 2, 500 engineers something they should have done, " Fenelon says.
Determined to avoid Kearns' fate, Fenelon tenaciously guarded his prototypes, forcing often reluctant manufacturers to sign nondisclosure agreements.
Fenelon also knew about the bittersweet tale of Robert Kearns, the inventor, in 1967, of intermittent windshield wipers.
Soon after that "fix" Fenelon went to lower his window and it fell like a stone into the door.
Fenelon knew, having run a company that supplied plastics to automakers, just how insular and risk-averse that industry is.
Every time Fenelon built a new prototype, he discovered ways to improve it.
Fenelon immediately pictured a simpler system that, now realized, is lighter by half, quieter, cheaper, easier to build and more durable.
In its latest incarnation, Fenelon's window regulator is less than half the weight of the arm-and-sector design, 2 pounds rather than 5.
Fenelon's license with Dura compels the partsmaker to help defend his patents, and Fenelon can market any improvements Dura happens to make.
"There's no way they can follow us, " Fenelon says of the competition.
The problem soon returned, and back Fenelon brought it to the dealership.
"Iwas absolutely flabbergasted by the complexity of it, "says the fiery Fenelon, 61, his brogue from a childhood in Ireland rising to a shout.
Fenelon had found what all casual dreamers and determined tinkerers crave: an elegant solution to a nagging problem, attached to a potentially giant payoff.
Fenelon's is a plastic set of parallel vertical tracks with teeth.
With the help of a machinist, and using a formula he concocted for a stiff, self-lubricating plastic, Fenelon built a crude prototype of the gear and found that the torque required to push the window was half of what the old design required.
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