In order to understand the product, you first need to know who we are. We are a small manufacturing company that is focused on designing parts to better prepare and protect tractors. We come from tractors, we use tractors, we love tractors, and we are trying to help the tractor community.

This started when a future customer called me about decking his new machine from head to toe with everything we built for it (and then some): a full protection package, all the accessories he could, and then having it all shipped to his local dealer to install.

They are one of our dealers and introduced him to our product line when he was ordering his new tractor. He had some questions beyond what the dealer had answers to, so they gave him my contact information so he could call me directly.

He wanted to know if he could bolt our toolbox tray to the extra holes on the side of our ChainBox, giving him a ChainBox, a chainsaw scabbard, and a toolbox on a single mount – allowing him to pull a pin and take the whole assembly off when he wanted.

I designed those holes for further expansion since I knew the mount could handle significantly more load than we were putting on it without concern.

But I didn’t have an answer for him on this particular setup, since the toolbox tray has a lip on it for added strength at the top, and it’s just not something I had tried.

So we grabbed the parts off the shelf and attempted to build it while I was on the phone with him. Mocking up the parts, we were able to see that it was possible, so we grabbed the hardware and bolted it all together. We mounted it up on a tractor and decided to throw a camera on it to test it out, post it on our social media, and so he could see it and hear my thoughts on it.

I use “we” and “I” as I write this because I may be a character and the author of the story, but this is a team effort by all of us at ITC.

We tried a couple of different configurations and made some update videos for social media. Ultimately, we decided to design a new bracket for him. We thought it would have value for our existing customers and be an option we could offer on the website for future customers.

We ran into a little fitment issue on the first version of that bracket, the toolbox did not open all of the way. I made a poor design decision during my process. (whoops)

We sent some update pictures to him since it still showed proof of concept, and made an update video for Facebook. Plus, a little algorithm-loved video that shot up to 230k views in a few days. Beyond what I have ever seen – so that was pretty cool. We had a lot of comments, suggestions, and some crap talking. Normal internet stuff.

We were able to get around the contact issue we had by turning the toolbox around on the mount and made a short video of that, but we decided we were not happy with it and wanted a version 2. Moving the toolbox further away would allow it to open all of the way, and we also wanted to add some slots for felling wedges. You can’t ever have too many wedges when chainsawing. As of writing this portion, v2 is not here yet.

I mentioned feedback when that one video blew up. One thing that got asked time and time again was:

Where do I keep my bar oil and mixed gas for my chainsaw?

Which is a great point. We used to stock and sell a mixed gas / bar oil combo can. We have a holder designed for it still. Gas/Oil and Tool Carrier It can still be utilized for that task, but not as originally designed.

We took a trip around town in our area and purchased as many different one-gallon gas cans and chainsaw bar oil containers as we could find. Locally, we found overlap on some products, and we kept track of what was available at each of our big chains, plus what was available at our local stores.

After getting all of this, I set up a survey poll on our website and made a video pointing people to the survey.