Keep 'Em Clean

It began with Scott Hunter’s restoration of a 1970 Bronco. Returning from his first check ride he slid under to make sure everything was ok & there it was.. a stripe of grease above the u-joints on his formerly pristine under body.

As the owner of a truck fleet that was always kept shining, Scott was all too familiar with the mess and clean-up costs of u-joint grease flung across the undercarriage of his Class 8 trucks.

Scott called his brother Ryan, a manufacturer of automotive parts and said “you have to make something to cover these u-joints”. Knowing it was a problem that needed fixing, Ryan got to work on some ideas. Ryan’s son Caleb used his appreciable CAD skills to refine and model the ideas. Testing and revisions were made using 3D printed prototypes and Protector U-Joint Covers were introduced to the trucking industry in 2024.

 

The Larger View

Preventing grease accumulation on the undercarriage will save fleet operators thousands of dollars in cleaning costs each year. Auto restorers and hot-rodders will rejoice at not having to wipe the underbelly of their car after every drive. Aggregate, solid waste haulers & farmers will celebrate not having rocks, land-fill debris & stalks wrapped up in their u-joints.

 

But what about the other 50% of u-joint grease that lands on roadways?

 

Mechanics are trained to "pump out" the u-joints until fresh grease is visible from all four u-joint caps to purge contaminated grease that can decrease u-joint service life. The amount of grease required for this process is easy to measure and perhaps the volume for each u-joint seems insignificant, but every commercial truck has between 4 and 8 u-joints and there are about 14 million Class 7 & Class 8 trucks operating in the US today. Rough calculations quickly get well into 10's of millions of pounds of lubricating grease thrown from u-joints onto US roadways, eventually washing into our watersheds each year.

 

Grease is recyclable just like motor oil and most, if not all of what's now thrown into the environment could be captured in u-joint covers, scraped out during service, dropped into the same barrel with used motor oil and recycled.

 

Moving Forward

Ryan is currently working to advance the adoption of his product with assistance from the Tennessee Manufacturing Extension Partnership (TMEP) and Tennessee APEX Accelerator, both of which are part of the University of Tennessee Center for Industrial Services (UTCIS). UTCIS Solutions Consultant Lee Leonard, PhD has offered the following assessment, “Ryan’s invention has the potential to both protect the environment and conserve natural resources. I am excited to be working with him on the development of this product.”

 

The TMEP is a service provider and consulting organization committed to building a thriving manufacturing industry across the state. The Tennessee APEX Accelerator (formerly TN PTAC) assists businesses in competing successfully in federal, state, and local government contracting.

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We're not only a business, we're also stewards of the earth (Protectors if we may), and

we believe both purposes can be in harmony.