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Dave Draper

Let's say you're looking for some sound benches, pulleys and machines to equip your gym; there are perhaps four or five brands to choose from that lead the pack. They've been around a long time, have name recognition and a good reputation. They also have a price tag to go with it,salesmen,vastness, an impersonal bureaucracy,complications and back orders. Happy hunting.

Beyond the top four are the lower 40 that have jiggles, wiggles and wobbles, thin metal and curious welds. You're considering 2x4s and plywood and self-manufacturing.

DON'T.

There's Torque. Their stuff is built like modern war machines, powerful and hi-tech, and includes it all, from utility benches to multi-station cable units. The designer and manufacturer is a team of engineers and technicians who work together to build a handsome product of pride and function guaranteed to outlast and satisfy everybody.

As for me, I wanted custom alterations here and there, logical adaptations that made the equipment I ordered specially suited for my needs. Odis and the crew developed my concepts and presented me objects of perfection. Further, I had a design in my mind for a weight lifting device for squatting, an invention. The team and I smoothly developed the Top Squat as I had conceived it and it's in use and production today. What was another good American idea about to evaporate became a valuable reality. I love the Top Squat and the process of building it.

Got some weightlifting iron and steel on your mind, trust Torque and the team. They work.

Dave Draper


TORQUE CONTRAPTION MAKERS

Article from davedraper.com, Iron Online newsletter June 2002
Written by Dave Draper

There's this very likeable guy, Odis, from Indiana who stopped by the gym last week with his fiance of 15 years. He's an engineer who considers things from every angle for a long time before making any sudden decisions. Just ask Cindy, his loyal wife-to-be. Now Odis and some college chums who did their time working for sterile corporations decided to match their skills and start a private engineering and manufacturing enterprise. They're doing well -- inventive, producing and respected. As a tangent venture to their conventional engineering business, they have built a line of commercial gym equipment, Torque Athletic by name, to compete with the high-end market with low-end pricing. They're smart, and greed has not spoiled their collective soul.

Torque equipment is handsome, features creative functional touches and will withstand the brute force of a rhinoceros stampede.

Odis knows me from way back and wants to work with me to create a powerful piece of equipment for home use: rack, bench and super attachments that work, really work, for muscle heads like us. This would not have the appearance of a trellis for growing ivy in the not too distant future -- no coat rack, this, but a proud piece that is efficiently compact but not squeezed... does everything, not poorly but very well... inspires vigorous use and almost guarantees lean body mass and power. It would not be mass-produced, but rather built unit-by-unit; an internet item with no advertising, distribution, warehousing or sales reps; maker to purchaser with subsequent honest, low pricing to match. The piece would bear my name and overall input.

And so we wonder, is there a market for this, The Iron Dungeon by Draper? Apply the valuable yet cost-free technique of whispering advertisement. Sell one fine-looking steel mass at a time until there's a fine-looking steel mass in every neighborhood from Secaucus to Seattle. Make the world a better place.

I've seen one or two interesting home devices in the marketplace, but they carry the burdens of the corporation with them -- bottom-line scrutiny, volume production, quality-sacrifice, many heads and hands in design and profit margin.

Odis and I have an idea a minute. We decided to make a thick-bar cambered curling bar and rack for arm-crazy lifters and metal thick-bar gripper attachments for dumbbells and barbells to appeal to grip fiends or the grip-impaired or giants. We have a secret super squat bar contraption, too, since you're being so snoopy. Can't wait to get my hands on the prototypes.