Bruce Bennett, the founder/CEO of Stage 8 Locking Fasteners, loved his Shovelhead, and like a lot of motorcycle owners, regularly worked on his own bike. Replacing a new exhaust pipe was a cinch – until the pipe fell off on the first day out of the box! Surveying the bolt, Bennett realized there was nothing preventing it from working loose again – and again. As much as he liked his bike, he wasn’t interested in replacing the same bolt every month for the rest of his life! He decided to do something about it. With the companionship of his dog Eightball, Bennett started with a simple concept: a bolt that wouldn’t work its way loose, even under extremes of temperature and vibration. How hard could that be?
Bruce Bennett worked two days straight on the new idea, with seven initial designs that didn’t work and an eighth that did. It turned out to be a simple but smart solution that laid a locking wrench on to a grooved head of a bolt. It locks down and doesn’t start to work loose when the machine vibrates or when metal gets hot and expands, then contracts and shrinks with cooling. But as he finished testing his creation, Bennett noticed that Eightball, lying on her bench in the workshop, had left this world. He honored his beloved canine by naming his new company Stage 8 Locking Fasteners. And, to come full circle, in order to raise funds for the patent and the first product tooling, Bennett sold the Harley.
Since then, Bruce Bennett has had plenty of experience not only supplying his locking header bolts to frustrated backyard mechanics, but in making them work for big industrial purposes. Everyone has something they want to stay put, and Stage 8 is discovering more uses every day. Stage 8 has supplied its locking bolts to companies that make locomotives, automobiles and earthmovers.