A story that appeared in The Journal Times on October 25, spotlights one of Snap-on's brightest and most celebrated employees as he heads off to retirement after 66 years. According to the report, the U.S. Navy approached Snap-on about making a wrench that wouldn’t round off their fasteners. So Snap-on tapped the help of one of its newest employees, Gene Olson, who had only been working for the company for less than a year.
“My boss came to me, ‘see what you can do,” Olson told Joe States of The Journal Times. “And my first thought was, well, you can’t round the corners if you don’t touch the corners.”
Olson wasted little time creating a sketched-out design of a new flank drive that incorporated a curve at each point of the socket so it would only touch the flat sides of the fastener rather than the corners.
“It didn’t take me too long, maybe half a day to sketch out the thought that I had,” Olson said. “The rest was history, they started buying a lot of them.”
Olson’s work earned him an honorific within Snap-on that carried him through his multi-decade career as the “Father of the Flank Drive.”
After more than 60 years working with the company, Snap-on recently said that Olson is set to retire this fall.
Congratulations on an amazing career, and happy retirement from the editors of PTEN and vehicleservicepros.com!
Read the full story in The Journal Times here.
