More About The Construction Of Floor Mats From Old Rubber Tires

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There is one final chapter to this thrilling saga, however, that you should know about. Mother Earth News' research department has managed to obtain a really old and really worn-out homemade setup for producing floor mats from old tires and we're now looking into the idea of redesigning and upgrading the machinery to make it easier to operate and a lot more efficient. And if that works, we may well take the next step of contacting a manufacturer, putting the equipment into production, and offering the complete setup for (we hope) no more than $2,000.

In the meantime ... don't call us, we'll call you. We have a lot of projects on our hands and it may be a while before we get back to this one. We'll keep you advised right here, though, when we have any new developments to report.

And one final note: The folks already in the floor mat business, both private and public service, deserve one big "Thank You!" and a pat on the back. Despite the fact that our activities in this field can do little but create competition for them, a number of small mat producers have gone out of their way to help us put together the information you see here. And we appreciate it.

BUT WHAT DO YOU DO WITH CASINGS THAT CAN'T BE RECAPPED?

Years ago, a Kansas wheat farmer named L.F. Schuhmacher began to draw big royalties from the gas and oil leases he sold on his land. And with some of that money, he set up an office in Meade, Kansas. And in front of that office, he had a cocoa mat for people to wipe their feet on.

Well sir, one night somebody stole that mat. So ole L.F. thought about that for a few days and then he bolted a knife to one of his tractors and he pulled an old tire around past that knife and, slick as a whistle, sliced the tire into two strips. And that worked so well that L.F. experimented some more and, within a few months, he'd applied for a patent on a machine that nearly anybody could use to slice old tires into long strips and then assemble those strips into floor mats.

One thing led to another after that, as always happens when someone comes up with a really worthwhile new idea, and Schuhmacher moved to Chicago and set up a firm called S. & S. Patents, Inc. And, according to some 1968 letters that L.F. wrote to one of Mother Earth News' editors, more than 1,700 little shops had been set up at that time to use S. & S. equipment to turn old, worn-out tires into shop, athletic and horse trailer mats. A great many of these little enterprises were netting $5,000 to $6,000 a month for private operators. And the rest of the recycling mini-factories were providing useful jobs for the disadvantaged at sheltered workshops, missions, halfway houses and other such public service institutions.

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