Left to His Own Devices

You could prosper in the field of wacky inventions.

--Peking Noodle Co.

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As resourceful as he is, home-product inventor David Hanacek knows to take advice where he finds it.

This has included fortune cookies, which he says have uncannily affirmed his career choice (while warning him against glibly giving away his ideas to other entrepreneurs).

And it has included Hanacek’s 6-year-old son, John, who insisted that colors be used in Dad’s new line of caulking-gun nozzles.

“Do a blast of colors. Nobody pays attention to dull colors,” the kindergartner reportedly told his dumbfounded father.

Who was Hanacek, 41, to disagree with such home-grown advice?

After all, dust in the heating ducts of his Capistrano Beach home led the allergy-prone Hanacek to a charcoal filter design that traps pollutants. Scraped fingers during construction projects resulted in a design for a bandage that can be applied with one hand. And expansive soil, which plays havoc with foundations in Southern California, led him to a new idea for a floating subfloor system.

When the kitchen sink backed up one New Year’s Eve just as party guests were arriving, Hanacek--who has built homes from foundation to shingles--changed roles from butler to handyman. In the process, he hit upon an anti-clog idea that he hopes will someday have plumbers cursing his name.

It is one dream among many for Hanacek.

Inventing comes easily to him--so easily it may well keep him from doing the hard part: seeing his ideas developed into products that people can actually use.

Right now, he is doing his best to stay focused on the Flow-Thru Finisher--one of several caulking tools vying for the attention of do-it-yourselfers. (In a month or so, it’ll be at Home Base; now it’s at Ganahl Lumber stores in Orange County.)

Hanacek not only invented the tool--which is manufactured in Fountain Valley--but also bought the plastic-injection molds, designed the packaging and is marketing the product. He figures bringing this simple invention into production has been a two-year, $50,000 project. The effort has been financed primarily through last year’s sale of a custom-closet building firm he and his wife, Amy, founded in 1983.

In his Mission Viejo office, Hanacek holds up a competitor’s caulking aid, one that doesn’t attach to the tube.

“See this? It’s rigid PVC,” he says. “It broke the first time I tried using it.

“Why complicate nature’s design? Everything’s perfect in nature,” he adds, reaching for his own finisher, which doubles as applicator and putty knife.

“Your thumb is perfect because it has a rigid skeletal structure but also a soft flex. So that’s what we duplicated. This finisher has the rigidity to move viscous material and the flex to produce a nice, smooth taper.”

Hanacek talks the way he thinks, with one idea overlapping the first, and he can’t keep his mind off his other designs, which run from solar refrigeration systems to paper shredders to wine-storage units.

The flow of ideas is both boon and bane.

“I’m sort of a lazy version of Martha Stewart. My ideas have flowed freely since childhood, so I’ve never placed great value on them,” he says. “I forever want to move on to the next thing.”

A great many of Hanacek’s ideas are worthy ones, says Kevin Prince, founder of Inventors Forum, a 6-year-old support group for inventors that meets monthly at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa.

Most garage inventors need help marketing their ideas, Prince says, and the support group meetings, which Hanacek does not attend, provide it.

“Inventors often have trouble making the transition from inventor to entrepreneur, but it sounds as if David is doing it,” says Prince, who also served as vice president of Macro-Search Corp., an Irvine patent agency that did patent searches for Hanacek.

“Every third day, David would come up with a new idea--all outstanding ideas,” Prince says. “Only 1% of our clients were as prolific. The mark of a good inventor is someone who can pump out ideas, but the problem with someone like David is figuring out which idea to focus on. The latest idea is always the most exciting. It can almost be a problem.”

Terry Vivian, a Garden Grove entrepreneur who has worked with many manufacturers at his plastic-mold company, also admires Hanacek’s ability to crank out inventions.

“David is prolific,” Vivian says. “I’ve wanted to go in with him on some of his ideas.”

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In college, Hanacek majored in philosophy, not engineering, and believes that his lack of formal training has helped him.

“Even though it’s a hard way to go, if you’re not taught everything, it forces you to expand your thinking,” he says. “Sometimes you come up with a solution that no one’s thought of and that you wouldn’t have thought of if someone had told you beforehand of an easier way to do it.”

That experience has come from many years of hands-on construction and bringing more than one entrepreneurial venture to life.

His talent and energy were evident at an early age, says his oldest sister, Betty Hanacek, who lives in Atlanta.

“In the second grade, I remember, he came up with an improved kite design, changing the ratio of tail to kite,” she says. “He made a robot . . . and once for the Fourth of July he made a working volcano--I don’t think our parents realized it used some kind of gunpowder.

“By junior high school, he was making furniture that used dovetail joints and inlaid wood. He was just real artistic, always up to something.”

Hanacek was the middle of five children in what his sister calls a “loud and boisterous” Czech American family in Flint, Mich. Their father is a retired tool-and-die maker who came up with innovations for General Motors, a company that served as a handy source of lucrative summer jobs for Hanacek.

“As a little kid I loved housewares. I designed a bedroom set for my sister and redesigned the whole basement. I was always trying to improve things,” Hanacek says.

One summer, needing money, he signed contracts with neighbors for snow shoveling.

“At the start of winter, an adult neighbor bought a snow blower and boasted of the money he and his son were going to make,” Hanacek recalls. “He became furious when he learned I already had everyone on account.”

This experience, Hanacek says, taught him to try to act first with an idea.

After high school, he left for the University of Michigan to major in architecture, psychology and philosophy--three subjects he was able to combine to graduate with a degree in general science.

He transferred for a semester to the University of South Florida, where he designed furniture as art.

“The art department got angry and said students shouldn’t be building furniture,” Hanacek says. “So I had to argue, ‘I’m not building furniture, I’m building sculpture you can sit on.’ ”

Among the furniture in his home that he built is a Southwest-style pine hutch made of 2-by-4s, with old copper tubing as handles. A coffee table has tin roof flashing for its top, and the bent nails in the TV cabinet, which serve as handles, were hammered in by son John.

After turning down a job at GM, Hanacek in 1979 moved to San Francisco and then to Laguna Beach. He got a contractor’s license, worked awhile in home construction, then began to sell his furniture designs, sometimes outfitting entire offices.

His building experience, he says, has proved invaluable.

“There are a lot of bright inventors, but many have never had the practical aspect,” Hanacek says. “I’ve done everything from laying tiles to installing plumbing to pouring concrete with my bare hands. It has helped me understand how things work.”

With partners, he went into business buying, then renovating and reselling, homes at a profit. As a quick means of raising cash to buy the real estate, he bought and repaired old appliances for resale.

“I got a thousand appliances by advertising and saying I’d haul them away for free,” he says. “Within weeks I’d filled seven garages in Laguna Beach. I’d go to Palm Springs, bush a dishwasher for $5 and turn around and sell it for $250.”

During this busy period he met Amy, who shares his love of building and business. They married and founded Closet Systems, based in Laguna Hills.

For 12 years they designed and built custom “space organizers” for homes and offices in Orange County. But the business kept Hanacek from the tinkering that he loves. The couple realized they would ultimately need to sell the business so they could work together to develop some of those ideas.

Time and again, Amy Hanacek says, they would see products that Hanacek had thought of years and even decades earlier. At a Price Club they once saw three such products, tauntingly lined up in a row on the shelf.

The first was an electric cord whose prongs are angled to allow furniture to lie flush against it. The second was a bendable “snake” light. The third was a water pitcher with a built-in filter.

“Now, every wannabe inventor is going to say that they had thought of those things too. And they have,” Hanacek says. “It wasn’t sour grapes, but it made us realize that I had to get back into inventing things.”

The odds of financial success in the invention business are slim. Only one of every 100 patented designs goes into production, and of those, only about 5% make a profit, says Prince, the patent searcher.

Hanacek has plenty of ideas to try, however, including a space-saving skylight system, a safer baseball helmet, a user-friendly drilling tool and a fiber-particle board, made of recycled trash, that can be used as wall paneling.

Hanacek has three patents pending, including the caulking nozzles and a display and storage system for them. The third is his clog-free drain system, which he describes as an enclosed trap and drain device that offers a simple, Drano-free means of clearing clogs and debris.

The ever-optimistic Hanacek, who also has a version for bathtubs, sees them selling by the millions to homeowners who would use them to eliminate odorous sink backups.

It would be a product, the Hanaceks believe, that melds with the “sexy” new hardware industry, an industry that’s being driven as much by housewives as contractors.

With Ralph Lauren and Martha Stewart both developing signature paint lines, the time is ripe, the Hanaceks believe, for their Flow-Thru Finishers.

“These can revolutionize the way caulking’s done,” says David Hanacek, echoing the hopes of many an inventor. “Do I want to rest my whole career on them? No. They’re just a launching point.

“The only time I have fun is when I tinker,” he says. “The fun is in the ideas.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Profile: David S. Hanacek

Background: Age 41. Lives in Capistrano Beach with wife Amy; sons John, 6, and Joe, 2.

Passions: Product and furniture design, tennis, tide-pooling with sons.

On the dangers of not staying focused: “My dad came to visit in 1994 and I showed him about a dozen [inventions]. And he got furious. He said, ‘I don’t want to see any more until you take one and do something with it. Sitting in a drawer, [these ideas] are not going to do anything for the world, for you or for anyone.’ It was hard criticism, but it’s true.”

On “real world” design: “Most people don’t realize that building is not a perfect science. There’s moisture, there’s dust, there’s irregular wood; there are a lot of gray areas where [materials] are not quite perfect. So everything we design takes into account reality, the real world.”