Fun Stuff

Little known facts about Gizmow

Eight-year-old Dominic’s drawing of Grandpa on the Gizmow.

The Gizmow Formula is the first and only mid-z rider that steers the front wheels and can perform a true zero turn.

The inventor and president of Gizmow is Jeffery Huncilman.

The chief engineer responsible for making Gizmow a reality is Mark Bland.

The color was chosen to match that of a dress of the inventor’s girlfriend.

While standing in our booth at the 2004 Expo Show in Louisville, a landscaper who did not care for the color of our unit commented to Jeff that our color was even less attractive than that of a Scag mower.  Dane Scag was standing next to Jeff at the time.

When Mark Bland was creating the drawings for our unit, the title on the drawings was left blank.  Jeff asked Mark to assign the company a name so it would not be confused with the other drawings in our system.  Mark asked what Jeff wanted to name the company.  Jeff said name it gizmo or widget or anything until a proper name could be chosen.  Mark added the W to Gizmo and showed Jeff the name.  The application for the trademark was filed the same day.

The Gizmow logo was designed by Jeff’s best friend’s sister and cost $50.00.

Five different seats were tried on our unit.  Five people were blindfolded and asked to sit on each seat. All five individuals selected the same seat based solely on comfort.  The seat was the least attractive of the five tested.

The steering wheels include a horn button in their assembly.  We hooked a horn to the button just to be amusing.  We later found that people liked to be able to get the attention of their co-workers.  The horn button was moved to the side of the unit as this location provides us with a better wiring scenario.

The original prototype is now over four years old.  It was tested on our 15-degree tether track for three months.  It traveled 45 miles per day for a total of over 3500 miles without failure.  We used 10 sets of tires during the testing. It was returned to service and is being used by a landscaper today. The unit has had no adjustments and has only received regular maintenance.

Our youngest rider is 10 years old.  He has earned over $2500 in his first four months of mowing.

Our oldest known female owner of a GIZMOW FORMULA is the 65-year-old mother of our patent attorney.  After riding the unit for five minutes, she went inside her house and emerged with her checkbook before ever asking the price.

One of our units was mistakenly driven off of our four-foot high truck dock.  The only damage to the unit was a bent steering wheel.  The rider was unharmed but is no longer employed by GIZMOW.

The attractive young lady in the video is Jeff’s girlfriend.  She had never driven the unit before the day of the filming of the video.

Since we always apply power to both rear drive wheels, our unit performs very well in wet areas.  We have never been able to get our unit stuck no matter what the condition of the ground.

All of our video is shot by our human resource director’s brother in law.  To film our unit in action, he was towed in a trailer behind one of our units.  While filming on a hill next to a lake, the trailer overturned dumping him and three digital cameras in the lake. Jeff was driving the unit that was towing our cameraman.

We ordered 3000 pieces of our first brochure.  The 800 number on the last page was the pager number for an EDS engineer in Washington D.C.

A radiologist, who saw our unit at the Louisville Expo Show drove 9 ½ hours to our factory to purchase a GIZMOW FORMULA.

There is a GIZMOW FORMULA in the United Kingdom undergoing extensive redesign for marketing in Europe. 

In order to save money, Jeff booked the rooms at last years GIE Show in a very inexpensive motel in the bad section of town.  The motel was surrounded by a chain link fence.  While returning from the vending machine, Jeff was approached by a drug dealer wanting to sell him a bag of what he termed “Rock and Roll”.  Brian Moore and Steve Holiday, two of the four GIZMOW representatives on the trip, refused to get into their beds and slept on top of the bedspreads.

Our steering wheel is made in China and is the only component of the GIZMOW FORMULA not manufactured in the USA.  The name of the company that manufactures the steering wheel is ironically named the American Parts Company.

Tony Estus, our plant manager, also owns and operates a landscape company.  He is pictured in our brochure.  The overhead shot on the inside of the brochure had to be retouched in order to hide the thinning hair on Tony’s head.