Originally Posted by JFP in PA
It was not generally available to the public until 2013, but was in use earlier at Raby’s shop only, and only in complete engines and not as a retrofit. Jake held this design rather “close to the vest”, and did not let the dual row out of his shop until even later (all the first IMS Solutions were single row design only, the dual row came out later).
THe reason that no one talked about it was entirely commercial, the patent had been filed for, but both Charles and Jake had learned a serious lesson from the development of their entire retrofit development: Say nothing, patent everything, which takes time, years in fact.. Jake and Charles spent a lot of time and cash prior to 2008 figuring out how to extract the OEM bearings and retrofit their products, developing both procedures and tooling, all of which was valuable intellectual property that they failed to protect with copyright or patents. Everyone seems to forget Porsche said that doing this was impossible without disassembling the engine. This allowed others to simply copy their tool designs and retrofit methods with a cheaper “me too” product offerings; some good, others not so much.
So having been substantially burned on the tooling and procedures used with the ceramic hybrids, the Solution was kept pretty much under wraps. As for this other design in the earlier posts, if there was either a patent filing or issued, it would be cross referenced in Raby’s patent in the Patent Office records if Jake had either acquired the rights to it, or if it had been issued to someone else (the patent office does this when technologies are similar, but sufficiently different enough to be patentable); but Jake’s patent is “clean”, no cross references to someone else’s work. What may have transpired is that this other individual did file an application, but found out Jake was there first, but there is no way to confirm that.
US201261677511P refers to another Raby filing on the same development, he actually holds multiple individual patents for the IMS Solution.
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