History of Electrical Circuit Disabler

In 2012, one of our customers asked me to come up with a way to attach our Fox-Paws units to their new equipment and vehicles without having to cut or modify the wire harness because it voided the manufactures warranty. They were at a point where their new trucks were costing over $100,000.00 apiece and our wireless or corded shut down devices called “Fox-Paws” were less than $2,000.00, I knew they were going to find a different solution to shut down their engine in an emergency, if I didn’t find some way to solve the problem.

After much research, and some experimenting we came up with an idea of pulling the fuse that controls the circuit of the modular or computer in a vehicle or piece of equipment. We tried this and the engine would shut down.  So, we knew that if we could make a fuse like end and connect wires to it, we could control the engine with our external relay controlled by our Fox-Paws receiver unit or a switch. Now all we needed to do was find fuse like ends. We couldn’t find any.  This turned out to be the hardest part of our idea. We bought all kinds of circuit breakers and dismantled them and after awhile we came up with something that worked. The next step was to make a harness that didn’t look like someone cobbled thinks together. Even the inline fuse holder we found did not work very well. I found some in Australia that looked great. I ordered some and they were not what the pictured showed on their web site and we had to sent them back. Finally, I spent one whole day looking on the internet and found one I thought would meet our needs. After a few months we finally had a prototype that worked and looked halfway decent.

We started including the new wire harness with our units and it was working very well. The customers were happy, and I was pleased it work, but it did not look as professionally made as it should have been.

I thought if I had this idea, someone else would come up with it also and I did not want to have to pay someone else a royalty on my idea. Then in January of 2013 I applied for a patent pending on the idea. In May of 2017 I received the Patent US 9,646,794 B2

In 2013 we started making the Fox-Paws Model 350 which had a magnet base bracket with a wire harness that plugged into the fuse panel with an external ground wire. This way we could piggyback power off of the circuit to operate our unit and still shut down the engine. This unit worked so well that we wanted to make this a portable unit to fit any vehicle or piece of equipment, but we had one problem. The end that was soldered on the wire harness would fit only one size fuse slot in the fuse panel. We had to come up with a different way of attaching our harness to any size fuse slot in the fuse panel.

In February of 2016 we had a booth at Worlds Ag Expo in Tulare, California. We entered their drawing and were chosen one of the TOP 10 new products out of 2500 exhibiters for the show.  We had a flag by our booth and received a plaque at the awards ceremony. But the best part of the attending the show was a good friend told me about these fuse adapters made in Canada. These adapters were just what we were looking for, to put different size fuse ends on the end of our harness.  Now we could offer a portable Model with a magnet base that would work with any size fuse panel just by connecting the correct adapters to our harness. It could be installed in a matter of minutes to any vehicle or piece of equipment. This was a real breakthrough.

Now this idea is the real backbone of our sales. We can sell our units to any business or individual and in a matter of minutes have it operational in a piece of equipment or vehicle. We must ask some application questions up front, so we know what components to put into the enclosure, but when it arrives it pretty much is a plug-n-play. Our customers are pleased how easy the installation is and if need be, they can move it from one piece of equipment to another in a very short time.

Lately we have had customers asking us, if our Fox-Paws units can just interrupt the electrical circuits of hydraulic systems instead of shutting down the engine in case of an emergency. They don’t want the engine shut off just certain section or sections of the equipment shut off. Our harness can plug into the fuse controlling that hydraulic circuit and then it can be remotely controlled, thus providing additional safety features for companies and their equipment.