It all started when...

I'm having a hard time deciding how much history to go into. I think the foundation for this project was laid when I was ten or so years old. That might be a little too far. Let's try August of 2010. I had just finished school and the lease on my industrial space was up. The decision was:

1. Pack up and sell off/store all of my shop equipment...then get a real job, you know, with a desk
2. Move into a smaller space and find some way for the shop to pay for more than just the rent

In any case, I packed up all my stuff and moved house. Here is all my junk on the back of a truck. Probably only about 10,000 lbs. worth. 

I was horrified to find my shop almost takes up an entire semi truck. 

It wasn't a very hard decision but I had no idea what I was going to do. For the last couple years I've been doing custom fabrication work and that is fun, but very irregular. Business wasn't exactly booming. I had a couple of personal projects (design related) that went into negotiations with various companies but nothing panned out. 

Then I dragged up and old project I had been meaning to get around to and that I thought would have some significant commercial potential. LED dive lights for scuba. Long story short, I started showing people my prototypes and practically everyone got excited about them. Normally I work on really obscure/niche stuff like fly fishing and I can see little question marks floating around people's heads when I talk about it. In any case, I decided to go where the interest was. If you want more details, check out the "Why flashlights" sticky.