Barrow inventor receives his second patent: lining up a solution.

• Author: Maloney, Lisa
• Position: SPECIAL SECTION: Manufacturing

Julian Ferreras invented a tool for cutting pilings perfectly level, with such precision that he could follow a pencil mark or split a tiny nail hole in half. "When I was building my own house, I wasn't pleased with how [a different tool] was cutting the piling," he says. He received a patent for his tool, the Ferreras pile cutter, in 1992--making it the second patented invention ever to come out of Barrow.

Now sixty-nine, Ferreras, an unabashed tinkerer who just can't help but spot ways to do jobs better or more efficiently, has done it again. His newly patented tool--the third patent to come out of Barrow--is a jig that helps workers drill perfectly straight holes through piling or glulam on the first try. Ferreras received the patent for his "Drill Alignment Tool" in June of this year.

"Necessity is the mother of invention ... I used to do that work," Ferreras says. Construction workers need to drill a hole through piling to install the column cap on every project. But when they do, Ferreras knows from personal experience that a missed try can mean hitting the metal plate on the other side of the piling, twisting the operator's arms or moving the drill up and down to find the right exit point, wasting time and creating a sloppy hole.

"With this one, the drill goes perfectly straight. So the hole is perfect," Ferreras explains. "There's no tool like it in existence." But first he had to convince the United States Patent and Trademark Office that his tool, which works on rectangular or round pilings of concrete or wood that are four to sixteen inches in diameter, wasn't just a larger version of the jig used to cut holes for doorknobs.

Ferreras says that the critical difference was the fact that, unlike a doorknob jig, his tool is made to place the hole in the exact same place on the piling every single time. Fine details like that are one of the reasons he's recruited the help of a patent lawyer for both of his applications, even though the process can be expensive for a solo inventor working on his own without corporate backing.

"Inventing is for rich people," Ferreras says ruefully about the cost of securing a patent. "It costs a lot of money to put the lawyers to work." He's spent more than $11,000 so far, not counting the fees he'll have to pay to maintain the patent. Still, he says, it's worth it to keep a patent from going up in smoke as a result of not using the right words to describe the tool.

Meet the Drill Alignment Tool

The...