for this episode of converter unknown I meet up with Dave and Tom Burson at the cat strap headquarters in Ohio enjoy guys thank you for letting us walk through we’re excited to see how it’s made thanks for coming and I’m excited to see the cat eye which we’ve never really talked about so can we go in yeah let’s do it all right I’ve I’ve seen this this a lot we’ve helped sell a lot of these and we’ve sold a few of the cat eyes but can you explain to everyone what the cat eye does when it got invented all you know all you can share yeah so the the cat eye is an infrared sensor that gets mounted underneath the vehicle and basically what it’s doing is uh waiting for someone to crawl underneath your vehicle it senses them and then activates a 130 decibel siren which is beyond the threshold of human pain so it’s a it’s a hostile dryer underneath the vehicle and uh yeah makes makes them get out of there essentially and at the very minimum doesn’t give them enough time to spend all the energy and and time under

there to to cut through any type of deterrent that you have protecting the converter so does this get mounted under the vehicle then is that where it goes kind of looking front to back it likes to kind of have a field of view kind of a panorama of what’s underneath the vehicle kind of like a flashlight beam so it likes to look from the front to the back and just kind surveys underneath the vehicle so it works up to about 15 feet or so a little bit of smarts involved in terms of like delaying the reaction the the siren until it makes sure that it’s actually a real input as opposed to a lead for uh or or wind or whatever so we you know try to make sure that there’s no false alarms how long how much r d was involved like from the first time you guys came up with the idea to like where it is today and like how many different versions of it has there been I guess this has been around the cat eye has been around for I guess about two years okay with some some iterations

uh uh you know basically the same format but uh just trying to fine-tune it to make sure that uh you know controlling the false alarms and making sure the reliability is there and consistent performance and you guys make that all in-house make it in-house here yeah yeah these guys right here are putting it together right yeah make sure that it’s all U.S made as far as the labor and uh and the assembly uh is concerned so do we have one do we have a complete one yeah let’s uh go grab one from over at our testing station okay so yeah here we have uh a finished cat eye at the testing station which will usually put our caps on so that is that just for this testing purposes we don’t uh hurt ourselves with hearing damage um but yeah so this is uh where we go through and make sure that the sensor is you know correctly detecting motion but not too quickly where a false alarm is you know because this is active right now right um so yeah this is uh this this is active um has about

a 30 second kind of calibration period okay because it just got turned on but um yeah it will um begin to start detecting any motion that’s in front of it there it goes yeah and I heard it earlier without that on there and that thing is yeah it’s painful oh it’s crazy yeah especially in the confines of I mean a room like this is actually bigger than um being underneath the vehicle but uh you know having the underside of a vehicle and the ground that sound just you know kind of creates an Eco chamber under there it’s they all come with the key fob yeah yeah okay so we do have an automatic version that has a voltage sensor in there so it detects when your ignition is on the alternator is charging your battery and it okay you know your battery voltage jumps up it automatically disables itself and then when you turn off your car the battery goes back down to its the resting voltage and it rearms itself so that way you have a manual one where you have to arm it yeah yeah and uh yeah the the fob gives

you the ability to take manual control if you ever want to but aside from that the automatic version can you know function so that it’s automatically taking care of itself and Tom you invented the cat strap am I right that came from and how did you invent that like where how did that start well we were I was an automotive repair shop for for many years and uh I think it was back in like 2009 or so our local vendor it was a Napa dealer actually uh that got hit wiped out all his stores uh drilled all the gas tanks stole all the converters and uh we came up with you know a rudimentary strategy to help him avoid any further problems and we wound up playing around with the internet and sold a you know a few and uh how many different versions of that has there been a lot you know a lot a lot of changes over the years and they all had their purpose so they all probably they all helped protect it they all did the purpose of you know of deterrent like it’s going to be a deterrent

but the better the deterrent the more likely people are just going to say that you know like oh I don’t I don’t want to mess with this and ultimately I mean I think that’s what we determine uh categorize a real success as is they don’t even try you know that’s why you know we’ve got the bright colors yeah look underneath the vehicle and you say there’s something definitely different about this and let’s let’s move on and even and if they did try the products good enough where they try and then they say oh like I’ve already used 4 Sawzall blades yeah of time to move on before I get arrested I’d have to say I mean I’m actually really proud of the product at this point kind of embarrassed about looking in the back in in the past and saying gee uh you know that’s what we had to offer but you know it was it it was uh Evolution uh it’s uh definitely a a great product right now um and uh oh we love the product we believe in the product and you know we’ve helped a lot of our customers with

it yeah were you with him in 09 uh I was off at College I actually did my senior uh entrepreneurship project on the catch trap oh really I’m in college owner of our company that was interested in his senior project on United hauling oh yeah yeah so it’s a similar similar yeah me and my buddies we uh yeah put together our PowerPoint decks and awesome man it’s kind of funny but uh and then yeah you know you fast forward um eight years into the future and all of a sudden it it really takes off and goes from this you know side project to uh full-blown company with you know 10 plus employees and um you know really a strong demand and solving a problem that people are you know need a solution for so I got the guy to come back to Toledo that’s that’s all I care about and you’re building them back here yeah can we go take a look let’s take a look yeah all right Tom Dave where where should we start like where do you want to start on the process of getting this yeah so basically what

we’re seeing here is um the outer shell of the strap uh come together um and then the the internal Metals which makes it you know really difficult to cut um are going to meet it but uh basically what we see here is uh that outer shell being um uh sewn together so the black side is going to have that the heat activated adhesive material that will stick to your exhaust yeah so that’s what’s going to bond you know especially along the hot spots like the converter body itself gets super hot um so yeah that’s um you know what what creates that Bond uh you know directly to the exhaust pipe and the converter body and then the opposite side is that bright fluorescent orange um material which you know we really want that there to be that obvious visual deterrent to yeah you know they look under there and they see man and that’s why you use the bright color correct yeah yeah so nice and bright orange uh it’s kind of you know it’s a an alerting color and he just has to sew all of them you know you you start it

from scratch basically with all the products and you get them together yeah it all starts from scratch We Roll on that um that adhesive layer onto the onto the fabric and this is all uh the fabric is um intended for exhaust applications it’s it’s a exhaust heat wrap used in like uh high performance like hot rod Industries to keep the heat inside the um did you always use that same material the material I think has mostly been the same because it’s such a extreme environment with temperature there’s only a few materials that could ever hold up to that amount of heat and so yeah this has the material itself has been pretty constant it’s the evolution has been more so on the metals that are inside that make it so difficult to cut so some of our customers or people on social media see a photo of the wound up one yeah and they think it’s literally like a roll of tape so I know it’s not a roll of tape people we can show to in person know that but what goes inside of it like how does that what goes inside that

actually protects the cat where’s that take a look at that okay uh yeah all right so what are we looking at Tom okay well this is um this is actually um multiple layers of uh cutting blade steel okay custom designed by our manufacturer to actually uh have a Rockwell hardness of about 55 which is harder than a high quality uh cutting blade uh Sawzall cutting blade and we have a patented uh process here and basically the patent hinges on the fact that we don’t have a static design it’s actually part of the strength of this is the fact that it actually is movable it actually reacts using one thick piece it’s on purpose to have exactly individuals yeah where they’re sliding around the yeah the patent is based on a movable barrier something that’s responding to the uh the kind of those multiple layers you kind of imagine the teeth of the saw blade they’ll grip one layer and then it tries to reciprocate back but then when it comes back down out and that layer smacks on top of the other layer and it just it kind of you know repels the blade

and it recoils it a little bit yeah and the the net result is just that it’s you try to cut and it’s bouncing around on the edge of this um you know the edge of the strap I’ve seen some of your tests you’ve shared with me like they’re awesome it is really cool it’s a big pain to try to cut through yeah and you do need multiple blades and you think like four or five blades you’re not really it depends yeah I mean we try to test with the highest quality blades we can find and yeah at a minimum three but I think you know your your average you know you probably need you know four or five at least of you know fresh you gotta cut both sides too you had to cut both sides you got to know when to change your blade when your teeth are dull and if they’re cutting it and have the alarm they gotta do that with that that’s shockingly loud like yeah okay and do you how do you guys get this in that yeah let’s take a look all right this table is where they

set do the final assemble of them yeah so here you’re kind of seeing the the metals uh Unite with uh the fabric that was sectioned and sewn together um and so um yeah this is where we insert it into on this end yeah he’s got a peck yeah and then uh yeah just sliding those in uh obviously pre-cut to match the the length of the fabric and um how long are these uh these are all seven feet long which is our standard plank for most gas engine vehicles but you also have a 12 footer we do yeah yep so after he does that what’s the next step to to crimp the end so the end uh yeah we we use we staple them uh but yeah basically you know you button up the uh the open side of it and make sure it’s you know both ends are closed and then uh then we’ll typically roll them into a coil and uh for shipping purposes uh to get them nice and compact yeah yeah well yeah we saw the roller too earlier I don’t know if we could watch someone roll one yeah

yeah it’s kind of cool we can roll one so we saw him roll them and I I just think it’s a great product you guys have made yeah thanks awesome and you guys are shipping these all throughout the United States yeah um yeah the US and Canada um yeah well we’ve been it’s been a pleasure working with you guys we hope to keep doing it and I know hopefully we get to do a follow-up episode with some more yeah products you guys have been working on and we’ll go from there absolutely thank you thanks Nick