Both hands on the wing: the bar and trim line patents

The pair

US7581701B2 and US7621485B2

Priority

Both 6 April 2005

Granted

September 2009 and November 2009

Named with Tony

John Doyle on both; Alex Peterson on the first

Why file two things on the same day?

Because they are one idea with a seam in it. A rider holds a bar; the bar steers; somewhere in that system there also has to be a way to change how much the wing is pulling. Treat those as separate problems and you get an interface where one hand is doing the sport and the other is doing admin.

Filing them together says they were drawn together. What the two documents split is scope: one claims the device, the other claims the trim routed through it.

Why say out loud that he did not do these alone?

Because this site publishes a line under one of Tony's quotes that reads: he says "we", the patents say otherwise. That line is only worth printing while it is true, and it is true of three of his six granted patents — not all six.

The patent grid names co-inventors on the cards that have them. It would be easier to leave the field off and let the reader assume. It would also be the exact move this whole series exists to avoid: a design record is worth something because of what it does not claim.

So: John Doyle is on both of these. Alex Peterson is on the control device, and on a third patent — the active canopy profile control, granted 2006 — alongside Aaron Sales. If you are reading this because you worked on that bar, the record has your name on it and OXZA is not the one who put it there. The USPTO did, in 2005.

What does a bar have to survive?

More than it looks. It is the only part of the system a rider has continuous hold of, which makes it the part that takes every input and every panic. It gets dropped, stood on, dragged up a beach, left in the sun, and asked to do its one job in the half-second after something has gone wrong.

That puts an unusual constraint on the design: whatever the clever part is, it cannot be the fragile part. A trim system routed through a bar has to survive being handled by someone who is not thinking about it at all, because the moment they need it is exactly the moment they have no attention to spare for it.

Does an interface patent age the way a structural one does?

Differently. The split strut and the one-pump manifold describe how a thing is built, and construction ideas either become normal or they do not. An interface describes how a person and a machine meet, and that gets renegotiated every time the sport changes what the person is doing.

Which is why one of these is expired and the other is still active, twenty years after the drawing. The bar itself moved on. The idea that the adjustment belongs inside the thing you are already holding did not.

Hood Memory Lane is the record of what was built in Hood River before OXZA existed. The dated version lives on Tony's timeline; these patents are assigned to Slingshot Sports LLC and OXZA neither owns nor licenses them, which the press page states in as many words. The current work is the REVSTAR system — where the same question about hands and adjustments is being asked of a foil connection instead of a bar.