The Innovations, Patentability of the CopperKey™ Tool

To achieve its proven stellar results, and to attract universal acceptance from working plumbers who deal every day with preparation of copper pipe, CopperKey™ combined the concepts of a lever and a socket into a single tool which embodies a female end, to clean the outside of copper pipe with a card cloth inner ring in the socket, and a male socket which embodies a twisted-in-wire brush contained in the socket itself. These sockets themselves not only give greater sturdiness and adhesion to applying the brush or cloth to the pipe or fitting that has to be prepared, in effect guiding the piece into the socket for maximum effectiveness, but, because they are on opposing sides of a lever device, permit maximum strength to be applied to the task through the very physics of lever technology. CopperKey™’s innovation derives from its application of a crank and lever feature to opposed male and female working heads.

And for those inevitable hard-to-reach areas where plumbers or their apprentices have always had difficulty obtaining the degree of necessary cleanliness, the CopperKey™ tool has a ratchet mechanism that greatly narrows the distance within which the socket-mounted-on-a-lever must travel to achieve its maximum cleaning effect.

In addition to these features, the CopperKey™ tool will outperform any tube brush (drill-mounted or not), 4-in-one or other similar product, or abrasive cloth because the CopperKey™ embodies 3 proprietary features:

1. The socket barrel contains a helix, causing CopperKey™'s patented abrasive materials to clean pipe diagonally rather than perpendicularly, cleaning in broad sweeps rather than in the clean-dirty parallel tracks of earlier tools.

2. CopperKey™'s proprietary abrasive material inside its tube-brush-like socket has a rubber base, providing a memory characteristic.  The earlier tools all quickly wear-out because the actual cleaning staples become flattened doing the work & stay flattened.  Our staples spring back and are refreshed by the rubber memory base.

3. CopperKey™ staples have a patented abrasive surface, so rather than smooth staples flattened out & trying to clean smooth copper, you have a vigorous abrasive surface sweeping across the outside pipe face.  The result is unsurpassed cleaning through patented abrasion technology exclusive to CopperKey™.

Thus, the CopperKey™ tool, by applying these unique innovations of physics to the dreary work of preparing copper pipe, achieves levels of cleanliness that are unprecedented, while reducing the time and effort required to get the job finished. Costly repairs are virtually eliminated, as are injuries to the working plumber. Work goes more quickly, more safely, more cost effectively, and more reliably than can be achieved withany other copper pipe preparation methodology available before the CopperKey™ tool. With the degree of pipe cleanliness achieved by the CopperKey™, even inferior grades of copper pipe flux appear to work effectively.

The CopperKey™ tool delivers all of these benefits and advantages, including a longer useful life than the tools which it replaces, for a retail price not much higher than the combined costs of the old-style brush and sand cloth combination.

The combination of these innovations, and the design by which they are made functional and available to the working plumber in the tool itself, are the subject of the learning as to which CopperKey™ has been granted patent protection.