Franklin Gurney starts Salida tool-share service
Frank Gurney, left, and Jamie Cowdery work on Gurney’s tiny home. Gurney has launched a local tool-sharing website, OpenToolShed.com.
Many of us struggle starting or finishing projects without having the right tools at hand. It’s hard to justify the expense of equipment only to be used once, then to take up space. Open Tool Shed is a new Salida-based startup that is looking to solve our tool mismatch through an innovative new tool-sharing system.
With the power of the internet to make these connections, now anyone with underutilized tools can offer them for community use and be fairly compensated. This is great news for anyone stuck mid-project with a sudden need for, say, a slide hammer.
Your neighbor might just have one available to borrow for a few dollars a day. Your neighbor’s idle tool earns its keep, and your project can move forward without a major expense.
Opentoolshed.com was inspired by situations like this – driving disassembled cars to parts stores and the shed full of tools whose project has passed.
Using opentoolshed.com is as easy as visiting the website, posting the tools you’d like to rent out or searching for the tools you need to borrow. Together we can forge real connections within our community while getting projects started and, best of all, finished.
Open Tool Shed founder Franklin Gurney said the concept is pretty simple. The website contains a directory much like AirBnB. In the same way a traveler gets connected with a spare bedroom, the Open Tool Shed platform seeks to connect available tools with those in need of those tools.
“It can provide a side income stream to those with tools to share and a huge boost to help projects all over town. The site is now in its infancy, but if tool sharing is an idea people like and use, I am ready to develop it into something great,” said Gurney.
Despite having no prior construction experience or tools, Gurney said he designed and built a tiny home in late 2015. “Upon completion of the project, I was left with a mountain of tools I had bought, and, being in a tiny house, minimal space to store it all.
“The thinking started then. Forget owning one copy of everything; how about a system to just pay for the use of the tools I needed when I needed them. Or at the very least, now that I had sunk thousands into single-task tools, it would make sense to rent them back out to anyone else needing, for example, a flooring nailer.”
Gurney thinks Open Tool Shed is right for Salida because it is “an active town of intelligent, capable people who tackle great projects. … It almost seems crazy it hasn’t happened already, but the time is right to get together and use what we already have to create a fair, shared library and make everyone’s lives just a bit better.”
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