Motorcycle ATV Technology

How to Make a Patent for an Idea: Survive the Invention Process, Help Humanity, and Make a Ton of Money by Herb Uhl

In How to Make a Patent for an Idea: Survive the Invention Process, Help Humanity, and Make a Ton of Money, Herb Uhl, a practical inventor renowned for creating the first two-wheeled ATV, delivers an indispensable guide for aspiring inventors. At 95 years old, Uhl’s wealth of experience and passion for innovation shine through every page, making this #1 New Release book stand out in patenting and product development literature.

A Comprehensive Guide with a Unique Perspective

Its comprehensive and realistic approach sets Uhl’s book apart from others on the same topic. Uhl thoroughly explores various strategies for developing product ideas and engaging in advanced thinking processes. He helps readers determine whether the patent process suits their invention, offering the valuable insight that patenting isn’t always the best route. Instead, he introduces the option of bypassing the patent route to go straight to manufacturing and marketing. This approach emphasizes working smarter, not harder, to achieve financial success.

Encouraging Innovation and Overcoming Fear

One of the most inspiring aspects of Uhl’s book is his unwavering belief that everyone has a million-dollar idea capable of benefiting society. He urges readers not to let fear or self-doubt prevent them from sharing their ideas. Instead, he encourages proactive participation in the evolutionary process of innovation, emphasizing the importance of every idea as a link to future progress. Uhl’s motivational tone is infectious, instilling confidence and possibility in his readers.

Overcoming Subconscious Hurdles

Uhl’s straightforward writing style makes complex concepts accessible, ensuring readers can follow along without feeling overwhelmed. He addresses the subconscious hurdles that often prevent people from pursuing their inventive ideas, offering practical advice on building confidence and taking decisive action.

The Risks and Rewards of Patenting

While Uhl advocates protecting intellectual property, he also cautions inventors about potential pitfalls. He discusses how the patent process can sometimes backfire, leading to complications that may deter or financially burden inventors. Furthermore, he warns against the risks associated with bank financing and partnerships with organizations like the Small Business Administration (SBA), which may not always have the inventor’s best interests at heart.

The Revised Poor Man’s Patent

For those operating on a tight budget, Uhl introduces a revised version of the “poor man’s patent.” This method provides a cost-effective way for inventors to safeguard their ideas while they test the market.

Practical Advice for Market Success

Drawing from his extensive experience, Uhl shares valuable insights into successfully bringing a product to market. He emphasizes the importance of product sizing for optimal shelf display and efficient shipping and highlights the benefits of utilizing free packaging materials, reducing costs, and enhancing profitability.

Cautionary Tales and Actionable Advice

Uhl’s extensive experience is evident as he shares cautionary tales that cover all aspects of idea promotion, patenting, manufacturing, funding, and partnering. These stories serve as warnings and lessons, guiding readers through potential pitfalls with actionable advice. Uhl’s guidance is practical and grounded, making complex processes understandable and manageable for readers at any stage of their invention journey.

Experience the Fulfillment of Innovation

How to Make a Patent for an Idea is more than just a guide to the patenting process; it’s an invitation to experience the exhilaration and fulfillment of bringing an idea to market. Uhl’s wisdom, accumulated over a lifetime of inventing and repurposing, allows readers to significantly impact the world while achieving personal satisfaction and financial rewards. His concise, no-nonsense delivery ensures that readers can quickly grasp and apply the concepts, making this book a practical manual for anyone looking to successfully navigate the world of invention.

A Brief, No-Filler Approach

Uhl’s delivery is brief and to the point, stripping away unnecessary filler to focus on essential information. This approach ensures that readers can quickly grasp and apply the concepts, making the book a practical manual for inventors at any stage of their journey.

Conclusion

Herb Uhl’s How to Make a Patent for an Idea is a must-read for aspiring inventors. It combines practical advice with motivational guidance, making it an invaluable resource for those looking to turn their ideas into reality. Uhl’s passion for innovation and belief in every idea’s potential make this book an inspiring and practical tool for achieving success in the invention process. Whether you are a seasoned inventor or just starting, Uhl’s insights will help you navigate the complexities of patenting, manufacturing, and marketing your product, ultimately leading to personal and financial fulfillment.

Author: Herb Uhl

Herb Uhl, who pre-designed the Honda Trail 50 and is credited as the inventor of the two-wheeled ATV (All-Terrain Vehicle), has significantly impacted the motorcycle industry. His modification of Honda Cubs laid the groundwork for trail bikes, three-wheelers, and ATVs. Uhl’s “Smaller Adult Motorcycles: Long Awaited New Market Segment” proposes high-end motorcycles for shorter riders seeking quality rides. He taps into an untapped market segment, addressing motorcycle ergonomics for men and women of shorter stature 1.

Additionally, Uhl shares his story of creating the Honda Trail motorcycle, a pivotal moment in motorcycle industry history 2. His influence extends beyond inventions; it shapes how we ride today 3.

In summary, the book and Herb Uhl’s contributions offer valuable insights into patenting and motorcycle innovation. Whether you’re an inventor or a motorcycle enthusiast, their work is worth exploring.

The Visionary Innovator: Herb Uhl Honda Cub Trail 50 USA ATV

In the annals of motorcycle history, few stories are as compelling as that of Herb Uhl, a visionary innovator from Boise, Idaho. Uhl’s story is a testament to the power of seeing potential innovation in an existing design and the transformative effects such vision can have on an industry¹.

The Beginning

Herb Uhl was the first importer of a Honda motorcycle of any kind into the United States¹. The Super Cub, known then as the C100 or CA100, was a scooter-like Honda with a pressed-steel frame powered by a 50-cc engine with a three-speed transmission and automatic clutch¹. Despite its innovative design, Uhl struggled to sell the Super Cub in Boise¹, Idaho because motorcycles were primarily used in the local mountains on the hundreds of trails and old mining roads in the area and seldom for city transportation because in 1960, Boise was still a small town.

The Vision

Rather than seeing the Super Cub as only a great little city transportation bike with little sales potential for locals, Uhl saw potential. He envisioned transforming the Super Cub into an all-terrain vehicle that could be used for hunting, trail riding, on the ranch, and on the open road¹. This would have huge potential for the local market served by Herb Uhl’s Herco Engineering Co. dealership.

In his custom motorcycle shop, Uhl began modifying the bikes to his trail and ranch specifications¹.

The Success

Uhl’s modifications were a hit. His sales escalated rapidly, culminating in a volume of Honda Cubs sold by Uhl that surpassed the combined sales of all dealers in the Los Angeles region. His success caught the attention of Honda, who visited Uhl to see what all the commotion was about¹. Herb introduced them to his trail bike based on Honda’s Super Cub¹. Impressed, Honda asked him for the specs and even took one of his bikes home to reverse engineer it¹.

The Legacy

In no time, Honda had production models of the first motorcycle-derived ATV, and it was for sale in all Honda dealerships. The successive Trail 90 became the biggest-selling adventure bike in the world³. Despite his significant contribution, Uhl never saw a penny from his innovation¹. But for Uhl, it wasn’t about the money. It was about making a contribution and making motorcycles better for the riders¹. Plus, he could sell more bikes with less effort because Honda was building his design, which needed no additional modification to serve his clientele¹.

According to Herb Uhl

One of my strengths is my ability to understand what the public wants in a specific product line. For instance, when I was a motorcycle dealer, I understood the customers wanted a trail bike and nothing good was available, so I made one by modifying an existing little city transportation bike, Honda’s Super Cub, transforming it into the first motorcycle-derived ATV, and that has led to a multimillion-dollar windfall for the major motorcycle manufacturers which has led to the four wheelers and side-by-sides of today.

I’m sure you remember that the Jeep was the first automotive-derived ATV and look how that has led to today’s super trucks.

Conclusion

Herb Uhl’s story¹⁰ is a powerful example of the impact a visionary can have on the world. His ability to see potential innovation in an existing design led to the creation of the Honda Trail 90, and the many ATV trail bikes, four-wheelers, side-by-sides, and adventure bikes that have followed. Uhl’s modifications transformed the motorcycle industry, and his improvements continue to be celebrated in the success of Honda’s new model trail bikes today⁴^,². Visionaries like Uhl should indeed be honored for their contributions to the world¹.

Note: During Uhl’s time in the motorcycle industry, his store was associated with 30 different motorcycle brands from 9 different countries in order to satisfy his customers’ desires.

Resources:

1. revzilla.com 2. en.wikipedia.org 3. motorcyclezombies.com 10. youtube.com

Video Honda Trail Origin Story Herb Uhl

I’m Herb Uhl, let’s start off in Boise Idaho. My wife at that time got hit by a car when she was riding her motorcycle and we got about 800 bucks for the damage. I fixed the motorcycle for a couple of hundred and the other five I put into the motorcycle business.

That was the start of the motorcycle business, 500 bucks. I opened my own dealership. I wanted off-road motorcycles because it was Boise Idaho, and very few people ever rode a motorcycle on the highway except to get to the hills in Boise Idaho at that time.

I wanted off-road motorcycles and so I took on Maico (m-a-i-c-o) and I they had Enduro motorcycles at that time. I know years later, Yamaha thinks they invented the name but Maico Enduros were available in 1955 – 56.

Herco h-e-r-c-o (Herb’s company) engineering was in Garden City, part of Boise. If you’re looking North it’s on the left. Simple as that.

I ordered a motorcycle, and I guess I sold a couple of them. Then the importer, Nicholas Gray, the importer at that time out of Detroit, came to see me, and he offered me motorcycles on consignment, which got me in the business. So, my total investment was $500.00.

You could ride from your house to the hills on a motorcycle without license plates. Nobody paid any attention. That’s what everybody did. Very seldom, anybody ever rode a motorcycle on the road. Well, there were a few road riders but not many.

There were a lot of dirt riders because the foothills were right there and so everybody went to the hills, and that was my interest too, I didn’t care about riding on the road. You can drive on the road, you don’t have to ride on it. And there were lots of old logging roads and old mining roads because there was a lot of mining that went on in that area. So, we explored all those old roads and rode in all kinds of places.

I ordered the first Hondas from Japan. In fact, I think I got the first Hondas that came into the U.S. A guy down in San Diego with the name of Sailor Maine also ordered about the same time. We both went into the motorcycle business.

They were actually off-road motorcycles. There was a little bitty article in Cycle World, I think at that time, that had a picture of this motorcycle. Honda, out of Japan, and everybody was wondering if the thing would be any good if it would be junk, or what it was?

It looked good to me, so I ordered a pair of them. I got them in and sold them almost instantly. I ordered more, and they wouldn’t sell me anymore because they weren’t serious motorcycles. Those were built in their race shop, and they didn’t realize that that’s what we wanted. They didn’t get the message for several years. They couldn’t understand it because we wanted motorcycles for off-road use.

When they moved to Los Angeles and set up American Honda, I was the first American dealer to contact them. That was when they were in an apartment house out on Sepulveda Boulevard. They were trying to figure out how to set up a distributorship in America. They were up in this big apartment in the apartment house.

The first bikes I got, I forget what the model was, but it wasn’t a series model. As I said, it was special. Then they came out with the CB 71, 72, and of course, the C-100, the Honda Cub. That was a little 50cc, and so as soon as they got set up on Sepulveda with American Honda in their little building front, I went down to see him. I ordered some of the Cubs and they had a little 150 as well, so I ordered some of those 150s, a couple of them, and ordered a couple of CB-72s and two or three Cubs. When they came in at Boise, I looked at those Cubs and wondered how I was ever going to sell them in Boise.

That’s when I started looking at them as, what I could do to them to make them so that people would want them. I got to looking at them and every time I walked by them, I looked down a little more and I decided that they would make a way better trail bike than the tote goats and so forth that people were using at that time.

There was a guy in Boise that built sprockets and had a machine to make sprockets. I ordered a sprocket to stick over the other one as an overlay. Then I ordered knobby tires for them because that would be necessary. It took several months for knobbies to come in for it.

I tried it out in the hills and found out that it actually worked really well, so I started building them and ordered them in. I guess I sold several hundred of them before Honda noticed that I was selling way more Honda Cubs than all of their dealers in the Greater Los Angeles area together. And these were city bikes, where they should have sold there but here I was selling them out in a little town in Idaho.

Jack McCormick from American Honda called and wondered what I was doing to sell all those little cubs because they weren’t moving. I told him to make them into trail bikes and so he said, “Send me one of them, so I can see what you’re doing.”

I sent it to him and he looked it over. They rode it around and played with it. Then they sent it on to Japan and told Japan that they wanted the exact same thing as a separate model. That was the start of the Honda Trail Bike. Of course, once Honda started building them, then all the other motorcycle companies copied Honda, and there was trail bike Yamaha, and Kawasaki, and everybody had a little trail bike of some kind. That started the ATV motorcycle business.

I was just selling motorcycles. It was just the way things were, you know, I was just selling lots of motorcycles.

(It didn’t bother you that they took your designs and made their own bike?)

No, really because it didn’t even occur to me that it was a big deal but that actually started the motorcycle-derived ATV. And that’s made the motorcycle companies more money than anything else that’s ever been done to motorcycles. That’s where it started, then the three-wheelers came, and from that then four-wheelers, and now side by sides.

In fact, if it wasn’t for that (Uhl’s trail bike design) the side-by-sides would probably say Chevy, Ford, and RAM instead of Kawasaki or Yamaha. So, that really started the off-road motorcycle business.

Getting to a little lake or something up in the mountains required a horse or a hell of a long walk. They were building little scooters with Briggs and Stratton engines on them with no suspension on either end so that they could go up into those places. They called those things “tote goats” which became a brand the company started up to build those little things. They had a piece of plywood on there with a little padding on it and covering for a seat and so forth.

I looked at that Cub and I said, “This will do a better job than that.” it was simple. Really, really simple. It was just looking at it and seeing another use for this piece of equipment that nobody was covering. There wasn’t anybody covering a proper trail bike, so I built a proper trail bike. Just by modifying that Cub and that’s all that was.

Honda never really understood the trail bike. They still don’t. And that you can tell by what they’ve done. In the first place, they didn’t realize that the seat height on the Cub had a lot to do with its appeal. The first thing they did when they designed their own, after copying mine, was to raise the seat height by about three or four inches. So, they never understood it.

They did finally understand that. Somebody told them they needed a high and low-range gearbox and they did that but they dropped it. That was the only thing that they contributed to the trail bike that really improved it, was a high/low-range gearbox.

This new one doesn’t have it. So, the new one is not a good road bike or a good trail bike. It’s neither one. What it is, is an off-road fun bike. That’s all it is. But if they’d left the high low-range gearbox in it, it would be a really good trail bike.

I made a bigger sprocket because it needed to have a lower range of gearing. I made a big sprocket that slipped on over the original and that made it a high/low-range gearing so that it could be used on the trail and that’s the way we sold them. If they wanted to use them on the road, they simply slip that sprocket off and put the chain down on the original sprocket and away you’d go. That was the main thing.

Then they had a leg shield on it and I took all that off. I took their bigger muffler off and put on a small pipe, again for clearance, and so forth. I moved the shock. The shock had to be moved at the top of the shock to give room for the sprocket to clear. I simply did that, moved the bottom of the shock out to the outside of the swing arm instead of the inside, and that gave clearance. Really, that’s all I had to do. And added the knobby tires.

They already had the trail bike. It was already in that design. They just didn’t know it.

The feedback I got from my customers was the best you can get. They were loving it and they and their friends were coming in and buying them too. Now that’s the best feedback you can get.

Special thanks to Callum Blackmore, Eric Stoothoff, and Adam Bale for helping to get the word out. Maybe someday, someone will make an even better trail bike.

Smaller Adult Motorcycles: Long Awaited New Market Segment

By Herb Uhl

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In Smaller Adult Motorcycles: Long Awaited New Market Segment, Herb Uhl presents a compelling case for a neglected motorcycle industry segment that could double global motorcycle sales. Uhl, known for pioneering the ATV market segment with the invention of the Honda Trail 50, leverages his extensive experience and innovative mindset to highlight the untapped potential of smaller adult motorcycles.

Identifying the Market Gap

Uhl meticulously identifies a significant oversight in the current motorcycle market: the absence of a full line of quality bikes designed for individuals with an inseam of 29 inches or less, a demographic that includes most women and men of shorter stature. This segment, estimated to encompass around 60% of the population, represents a substantial portion of potential motorcycle buyers who are currently underserved.

A Vision for the Future

With a visionary approach, Uhl outlines the necessary steps to capitalize on this market opportunity. He argues that creating upscale motorcycles tailored to the ergonomic needs of shorter riders can attract a wealthy clientele eager to invest in high-quality, well-fitting bikes. This new segment would not only cater to the practical needs of these riders but also appeal to their desire for stylish and sophisticated transportation options.

Statistical Evidence and Market Demand

Uhl bolsters his argument with recent statistics, revealing that 18,550 people in the USA searched for smaller motorcycles in the past month. This data underscores manufacturers’ demand and urgency to address this market gap. Uhl’s detailed analysis and presentation of these figures make a strong case for the profitability and necessity of developing a full line of smaller adult motorcycles.

Engineering and Ergonomics

One of the standout aspects of Uhl’s proposal is his focus on motorcycle ergonomics. He emphasizes the importance of designing bikes that fit the physical dimensions of shorter riders and provides a high-end, comfortable riding experience. This attention to detail ensures that the proposed motorcycles would not be mere scaled-down versions of existing models but thoughtfully engineered vehicles that meet the specific needs of their target audience.

A Call to Action for Manufacturers

Smaller Adult Motorcycles is a call to action and a detailed blueprint for motorcycle manufacturers. Uhl’s expertise and credibility lend significant weight to his proposals, and his clear, well-supported arguments make it difficult for industry leaders to ignore the potential benefits of this new market segment. By highlighting the gap in the market and providing a roadmap to success, Uhl positions himself as a forward-thinking advocate for innovation and inclusivity in the motorcycle industry.

Conclusion

Herb Uhl’s Smaller Adult Motorcycles: Long Awaited New Market Segment is a visionary work addressing a glaring motorcycle industry omission. Uhl’s expertise and ability to present a well-reasoned and data-driven argument make this book an essential read for industry professionals and motorcycle enthusiasts alike. By focusing on the ergonomic needs and preferences of shorter riders, Uhl champions a more inclusive market and unveils a lucrative opportunity for manufacturers to expand their customer base and increase sales. This book is a testament to Uhl’s innovative spirit and enduring impact on the world of motorcycling.