Creative Collaboration Chinook Technologies Works With Other Companies To Improve Products

They search for a better way to make something. They design a better container or housing for a tech device another company is ready to launch.

The five employees of Chinook Technologies are problem-solvers for other area companies.

“We’re not Einsteins,” said Greg Somers, who with partner Ron Stokes started Chinook Technologies four years ago.

The company’s core service is engineering design, the ability to identify better ways to produce a new product.

“We go out, we research and find what’s worked for someone else, and we apply it to the problem,” Somers said.

“We’re technology vacuum cleaners. We’ll take anything that’s worked somewhere else and fit it to a job at hand.”

With offices in the Spokane Industrial Park, the company has taken on large and small jobs alike.

For Avista Corp., Chinook crafted a hard-plastic case for the early versions of the utility’s fuel cell products.

Last year, it also devised a complex solution to the problem of bonding spongy silicone to heat-resistant plastic. The result has led to production of specialized teeth-cleaning tools for professional hygienists.

Somers and Stokes first met while collaborating on products for Key Tronic Corp., which at one time was the world’s largest independent producer of keyboards.

After several years there, they both quit Key Tronic, realizing they worked well together.

Said Stokes: “We are unstoppable. When someone tells us it’s impossible to get a result, we go after it, heads down.”

For the first time this past year, Chinook netted revenue above $1 million, said Stokes.

Some of that revenue came from working on a hand unit for Microsoft’s SideWinder GameVoice.

The SideWinder GameVoice is a PC peripheral device that allows online gamers to talk with each other over the Internet. That work led to two other Microsoft projects. One is a component in Microsoft’s Xbox, the nextgeneration gaming system due out sometime next year.

Stokes said he’s prevented by contract from providing details on Chinook’s two current Microsoft projects.

Chinook also received $100,000 from American Dental Services of Spokane, the company producing and selling the dental tools with the silicone handle.

Alan Holmes, president of American Dental, created the tool idea, believing that a softer, easier-to-hold cleaning tool would be popular on the market.

Hygienists mostly use stainless steel cleaning tools to dig out plaque from patients’ teeth. But many complain the tools feel stiff and cold, especially after several hours of work. The stainless steel tools also are slippery when covered in moisture.

Holmes’ tool design involved a hard, heat-resistant plastic cylinder that would be coated with a spongy, cleanable silicone layer.

While both materials are widely used in industrial applications, Stokes said no one else had found a way to permanently attach the silicone sheathe to the “alltem” hard plastic.

Alltem plastic, used in the food and medical industries, has to be durable to withstand frequent sterilizations.

Chinook’s mechanical engineer, Mark Stokes, Ron’s brother, hit upon a system using a patent-pending process of electronically charging and heating the surfaces so the bond becomes permanent.

Holmes now has a marketing company selling the new tools for $20 each. Since Mark Stokes created the machine that bonds the surfaces, Chinook for now is manufacturing about 60 of the tools per day at its Spokane Valley plant.

It is charging American Dental about $2 per piece to produce the cleaning tools. If demand increases, Chinook would gear up to manufacture 600 of the tools per day, said Ron Stokes.

Another company that found Chinook is Tri-Cities start-up MesoSystems, a 30-person company that designs and builds specialized environmental chemical test devices.

Last year, MesoSystems engineers were ready to produce the BioCapture BT-550 - a high-end, portable device designed to identify any kind of toxic chemical in a room or building.

That product is being marketed to emergency response teams in the military and public agencies that deal with toxic spills or terrorist attacks.

But the first version of the product was boxy and clunky, said Pat Call, product development vice president at MesoSystems.

Within six weeks, Mark Somers and Stokes turned out a simpler, sharper-looking case for the unit, Call said.

“The people at Chinook are fast and very helpful,” said Call. “We consider them a key partner and will use them with our other products.”