Jack Hohner Innovative Drafting Process Needs Funds Infusion

Jack Hohner has been working full-time at making his brain child pay off for almost nine years now. In that time, he’s raised $750,000 dollars and managed to sell only four of the devices.

But he remains convinced that the breakthrough is just a few more months and another fund-raising effort away.

“We think we can grow the company to $100 million in sales within five years,” Hohner says confidently.

Hohner is president of Axama Corp., a four-person Spokane company dedicated to the design and manufacture of a device that will simplify the process of computer-aided drafting (CAD).

If the company can raise $4 million - likely through a public offering - Hohner says he can have the latest version of his device into production within six months.

Ten years ago, Hohner worked for a local engineering firm, which put him in charge of implementing a CAD system. Engineering companies were attracted to the computer systems because of the greater accuracy of the drawings they produced.

Hohner worked at the problem for a year and a half, constantly refining software. But in time analysis studies comparing the computer system to manual drafting, “CAD would always come up way short,” Hohner says.

The problem then was that computers were too small and slow. A draftsman would work at the computer on his design, and then need a print-out to check his work, because the details are obscure on a small computer screen. Printing the document on a plotting device was a slow, tedious process.

Hohner came up with the concept of making the printer a full-scale display device that showed the draftsman’s work as he was doing it. That way, the draftsman or the engineer could check the work without the print-out delay.

Hohner raised some money through investors and came up with a device in 1988. He won a patent on it in 1991.

He built the device by modifying a plotter manufactured by a Japanese company. But just as he was ready to go into production, the Japanese company halted production of the plotter. That forced Axama to manufacture its own device. And that meant more delays and more fund-raising.

During all this time, of course, the computer industry was hardly standing still.

Desk-top computers became much more sophisticated, capable of processing data at much greater speeds. The plotters that printed out CAD drawings became much faster as well. So some of the original problems Hohner’s invention was meant to address were simply not as formidable.

But the new efficiencies created a new set of problems.

“Faster plotters have created a document problem,” Hohner says.

In a company like Boeing, for example, groups of engineers work on any given design. Each engineer will make his own updated print-out of a design.

“And with a lot of transitory documents floating around a design group, it’s easy to lose communications within the group,” Hohner says.

A company like Boeing produces vast amounts of paper in the design process, he says, “so you have tremendous storage and retrieval problems with all those documents.”

So Hohner has modified his concept to address those issues.

His original device drew the “real-time” design on a single piece of mylar. To switch to a different design, the mylar had to be replaced with a new sheet.

The latest version of the device, though, includes a roll of 250 mylar sheets that can be called up individually by computer, so a single device can accommodate the work of several engineers and draftsmen.

But more important, Hohner and his group have come up with another invention for which they are seeking a new patent. This device erases lines on the mylar sheets, allowing an engineer to call up a given design and modify it on the full-scale display.

“This is totally unique,” Hohner says. “No other output device on the market that we know of provides for the editing of the image.”

Hohner will aim the device at the large corporate market, with a price tag of about $50,000 each.

Work on the latest prototype is proceeding well and Hohner says he just needs the infusion of cash to get his invention into production.

Finally.

“If I’d known it was going to this rough a road, I think I still would have undertaken it,” Hohner says looking back at the past nine years. “It’s been exciting and immensely rewarding at times.

“We had so many instances during research and development where we made breakthroughs in technology that left us celebrating.

“We’d go out for pizza and beer and pat each other on the back because we’d achieved something with hardware or software that kept the whole thing going.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo