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| | | Press | | In The News . . .
Our serious tools have drawn consistently positive press coverage from the major media, including the organizations whose logos are pictured in the column to the left. In this Section you?ll be able to retrieve the full text of some of these important reviews as well as to view our recent press releases.
CFSDlogo2We also encourage you to visit the Center for Safe Driving where you will find a variety of resources to help you prepare for the challenges of winter driving. Insert the CSD logo in line with the text; this graphic can be found in File #8.
Journalists, bloggers and other members of the working media may obtain a free IceDozer for review purposes. Please direct your media and PR inquiries directly to Marvin Weinberger. He can also be reached by calling 610-789-1137.
Please select from the following Quick Links to read the full text of independent reviews or simply scroll down to begin reading.
Press Releases . . .We have also recently issued the following press releases. The full text can be retrieved by selecting one of the following. To open these documents you will need Acrobat Reader (version 7.0 or higher) which can be downloaded ? at no charge - from Adobe.
Popular Science . . . Space-Age Ice Scraper
© 2002 - Popular Science
Published on February, 2002
You could probably get through winter without an ergonomic ice scraper, but why?
The Ice Dozer gets the job done quicker and better. The wild-looking Dozer has micro and macro teeth for clearing ice, and a straight edge that flexes to follow the curve of the windshield.
A pistol grip lets you put your full weight behind each push. Price $15.
Gizmodo Show That Ice Who Really Wears the Pants
© 2005 Gizmodo Published October 28, 2005
Yeah, it?s getting cold and that sucks. What is even worse about the weather turning grim is that ice that manages to molest every part of your windshield on a nightly basis. Put those puny ice scrapers down and pick up the Ice Dozer. This thing will turn your
windshield into its own personal fighting arena going toe-to-toe with that ice and eventually making it weep in pain and agony. Don?t forget to keep it handy for bashing in the skulls of potential car-jackers.
Winnipeg Free Press A Close Scrape
Carolin Vesely
© 2002 - Winnipeg Free Press
Published on January 26, 2002
Hey you, Jack Frost.
Did you really think your hot, sultry breath alone would melt that layer of ice on your windshield?
We can see your beady little eyes trying to navigate the road through that donut-sized hole you scraped clear with your Visa card. People like you are road hazards, hell on wheels.
You're a prime candidate for the IceDozer. Click onto www.innovationfactory.com and place your order now before MPI makes you its poster child.
While the name may conjure images of a narcoleptic Zamboni driver, the IceDozer is, in fact, the world's first high-tech ice scraper. Its Pennsylvania inventors applied the same principle as the folks who make lady shavers: Your windshields (legs) are curved, so why use an ice scraper (disposable razor) with a flat blade? IceDozer has a Flexiblade solves that problem, and the ergonomic design -- palm handle and saw handle -- is "suited to the body's normal motion." (Winnipeggers are masters of the 'motion' we hereby dub the Windshield Shuffle.)
And since ice can't always be scraped away, IceDozer has micro and macro teeth for cracking it. (Very therapeutic.)
The media 'evaluation sample' was actually sent to the boss and he insists we return it to him when our evaluation is complete. Thus, we thought the IceDozer was best evaluated on his windshield.
We're pleased to report the macro teeth do indeed crack stubborn ice. We also strongly suggest you hold the 'saw handle' with both hands to prevent slippage.
Oops. Who knew fiberglass cracked that easily?
Oh Gizmo
The Ice Dozer
©Oh Gizmo
David Ponce
Jeevus Christ! Just yesterday, I swear I saw some snowflakes. So that?s it, this year, I ain?t buyin no crappy, flimsy cheap plastic windshield scraper that leaves me in the cold, chipping away at the ice for hours like a tard. I?m getting this: The Ice Dozer. It ?Man-Handles Ice and Snow From Your Windshield in Seconds - So You Can Start Your Day Without a De-Icing Debacle!?
Apply pressure to the palm handle, and the oversized blade flexes to match the curve of your windshield, clearing a 7? swath, instead of a sliver of glass. Front plow pushes snow and ice ahead of you, away from sleeves and wrists. Two different sets of ice-cracking teeth pulverize the hardest glare ice in short order. And ergonomic handles give you all the grip you?ll need to clear your windshield in no time, and have fun doing it!
These guys can sell. I?m actually almost looking forward to winter, just to see how this thing manages.
Anchorage Daily News IceDozer Comes Armed to the Teeth for Battle
MAN'S WORK: The traditional scraper can't hold a candle to this one.
Alberto Enriquez
© 2002 - Anchorage Daily News
Published on February 15, 2002
There's no question where the makers of the IceDozer window scraper are coming from. With "dozer" right there in the name and styling in Caterpillar's black and yellow tracks, this is clearly meant to be a manly tool.
Manly scrapers of windshields, men who may never touch the lever of a backhoe, bucket or blade, may fancy a feeling of Cat-like power as they grab this tool and plow righteous row upon row across any ice that dares obstruct their view. If there's a bit of the lumberjack in you, the cross-fisted grip might suggest a possibility of kickback. Or the harrowlike toothed blade might bring out the farmer in the urban agrarian -- even if the blade is gray plastic and 7 inches across.
But does the dang thing work? We decided to test it in Anchorage's first major dust-up of the new year on Tuesday.
"Hey, that's good! I like it," Fulu Mua of Anchorage said Tuesday after a tentative jab blasted the ice crust off the window of his friend's pickup truck. "It works better than a regular ice scraper."
Admiring Mua's handiwork from the driver's seat, Billi Tomo, also of Anchorage, chimed in, "I would buy it. Oh yeah. I'd pay like $20."
Actually, it's $14.95 from the Innovation Factory at www.innovationfactory.com. Sound high for a scraper? Boys, you're getting a bigger stock (handle seems too weak a word) than you'd slap on an Uzi.
It's made of "virtually indestructible" high-density polyethylene. The polycarbonate blade is even tougher. Tossing it around on a plowed concrete walk left just the very tips of the blade and one of its 17 teeth slightly dinged.
Still worked just fine. It's definitely tough enough to hold its own in your pickup's lockbox. Picture Sam Jackson in "The Matrix," if Jackson were an ice scraper and ice scrapers made movies.
But seriously, and styling aside, what sold Mua and Tomo right off was seeing the flexible blade leave a uniformly clean swath 7 inches wide. There's very little backing and hoeing to clear a curved windshield with the flexible blade as compared to little bitty straight-edge scrapers.
This wasn't deep, thick ice, but the rippled stuff you get when snow freezes on a recently defrosted window. Which brings us to a serious downside. There's no brush. Much of the time, when it's consistently cold and the snow is dry, that's all you need. That and a bitty scraper on the end. Your wipers do the rest.
On a day like Tuesday when the wind was depositing veritable snow dunes on trunks and hoods, a long-handled brush-scraper made quick work of the snow -- without channeling it up a sleeve. The Innovation Factory does make a separate SnowMover brush tool ($19.95) to brush the snow off your car without scratching.
Toward evening, when cars parked pointing north all day had thick ice fused to their windshields, Daily News staff had the chance to test the IceDozer out on several more vehicles.
Their conclusion: The beast does its work quickly, but the two-fisted overhand grip makes it hard for the short of limb to reach the middle of the glass. Still, for those days when the rime on your car reaches enamel-like proportion, the IceDozer may be the right tool for a tough job.
Baltimore Sun Little Snow Leaves Him in the Cold
Rob Kasper
© 2002 - The Baltimore Sun
Published on January 26, 2002
I have a bad case of ice envy. Yesterday as I scanned the weather forecasts from cities around the globe, I got jealous when I saw that the folks in Fairbanks, Alaska (11 below zero), probably have ice coating on their car windshields this morning.
I have been feeling chippy since last week, when I started packing an ice-busting piece of business named the IceDozer. It brings a no-nonsense, three-pronged attack to the task, indeed the civic duty, of clearing ice off your windshield. It has been available to the general public for only two weeks. I have been packing one for seven days, four hours, hankering for some ice to tussle with. I thought I might have had some action when last Saturday's storm dropped a couple of inches of snow on us. But shucks, it wasn't even close to a fair fight. I put the IceDozer in its least combative position, made one jab with it and all of the snow and ice scooted off the windshield, like a whipped dog turning tail and running for cover.
! was careful not to let this bad boy touch the car's paint or window gasket, because it would, I had been told, take them out, too. I also stored it in the trunk, not the back seat. If anybody's rear end came in contact with the sharp edges of the Dozer, he would be hurtin' for weeks.
In case you haven't figured this out by now, the IceDozer is a tool for people like me, who, as our loved ones have informed us, have inordinately deep feelings about the importance of removing all the frozen precipitation from cars. (If I ruled the world, anyone who failed to clean all the ice and snow from his vehicle - INCLUDING THE ROOF! - would be cast into leg irons.)
In addition to maintaining a commitment to the cause of clean cars, owning this tool requires a willingness to shell out $15 for what some people - those content to drive around with itty-bitty openings on their windshields - might regard, in their ignorance, as too much tool. You must also be willing and able to go online. The IceDozer, and its companion auto-cleaning tool the SnowMover (more on that later), are sold only on the Internet, at www.innovationfactory.com.
What you get for your $15 is a cool tool that resembles the toy yellow bulldozer many of us spent many happy hours playing with as a kid. It has a flexible scraping blade, an impressive snowplow-style front and a set of fierce teeth underneath, for the rough stuff. It takes two hands to operate this baby, and it sports multiple, gimme-some-leverage hand grips.
Yesterday I called Hanover, Pa., and spoke with Marvin Weinberger, who, along with his partner, Tucker Marion, dreamed up the IceDozer. It quickly became apparent that Weinberger was also pining for bad weather. "There is a blizzard in Finland," he told me for openers. He had just spoken with his brother, Bruce, a saxophone player, in Helsinki, where the lucky duck was in a snowstorm while waiting to perform in concert.
Weinberger told me that for a time, he tried his hand at playing violin but then went on to get an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Boston University. His partner, Marion, has a degree in mechanical engineering from Bucknell and is perusing a master's degree at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business.
The IceDozer was born, Weinberger told me, on a flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco, where the two men were headed to raise money for another of their inventions, a toy decoder ring. On the morning of their flight, Weinberger had trouble clearing the snow off his Nissan Maxima and Marion had trouble scraping off his Volvo station wagon. On the flight to California, the two men talked about what an ideal windshield scraper and snow remover would look like. By the time they landed, they had the concepts and some preliminary sketches.
Later, when the dot-com collapse flattened their chances of launching the decoder ring, they turned their creative energies to battling ice and snow. They came up with IceDozer and the SnowMover, a shovel with rubber-covered lips mounted on a 3 1/2 -foot-long telescoping stick designed to clean snow off the tops of vehicles without scratching the paint.
During our phone conversation, Weinberger gave me a short tutorial on the three types of windshield ice: the annoying frost, the deep ice that pushes back when you push forward, and the thick, virtually immovable ice formed by freezing rain. He told me, in great detail, how each facet of the IceDozer was designed to defeat each type of ice.
He had me salivating as he described how, during the testing process, he had taken the IceDozer to a laboratory outside Philadelphia and "tested until destruction" - breaking off sheets of ice formed by the lab's liquid nitrogen until the device cracked. Then, he said, he went back to the drawing board, fixed the flaw that caused the crack, and returned to the lab, with the now unbreakable Dozer, to tussle with more ice.
He also stirred my soul when he told me tales of the SnowMover, the $20 telescoping shovel.
"It is great for cleaning those SUVs," which he noted always seem to be driven by "petite women who can't reach the roof."
When I heard about the SnowMover's 42-inch reach, I had visions of buying one and forming a vigilante patrol. I figure after a snowstorm I could ride around town and look for cars with snow still piled on their roofs. I'd catch them at a stoplight, roll down my window, extend my SnowMover and clean their rooftops.
While Weinberger seemed to share my passion about the importance of driving a vehicle free of frozen precipitation, he had some compassion for the folks who don't clean their windshields and rooftops.
He said that he had taken surveys showing that the majority of people knew that driving around with ice on their windshields and snow on their cars was unsafe. They gave several reasons for not removing the snow and ice, including not wanting to get their coats wet and being in a hurry.
I figure now that the Snow-Mover and IceDozer are on the scene, there is no excuse for driving a snow-covered car. But those of us packing this righteous attitude and our fierce snow-removal tools have one big problem. Thanks to this winter's 60-degree weather, we don't have an enemy.
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