The Glass Brothers, Part Two ~ Stab Cat, Inc.

“That’s when the light bulb went off and Stab Cat was born, because I knew there was a better way. The term “working tops” came from our union hall days. That is when a top man sits astraddle at the top of the sheet that is in the ground with his feet in a pair of stirrups. He then stands in the stirrups to line up the next sheet. Once he let that sheet down, he would stand up, put the stirrups on the next sheet and get astraddle of it. One thing that made it so dangerous was when the operator would pick up the sheet and swing it around; if the wind caught it or if you and the operator were not on the same page things could go south quickly. As a top man, you were in a very vulnerable position,” declared Sam.

“One time I was working tops in the early 70s at the Houston Medical Center and had an operator that none of us piledrivers knew. We were working for a nonunion company that had signed an agreement with the piledrivers local 2079. The sheets that we were setting were about thirty-five feet long so working tops I was sitting thirty-five feet up. It was wintertime, so at first I didn’t put two and two together, but I noticed that in the mornings the operator was fairly smooth, but as the day went on the wilder he would get. He had a Stanley thermos bottle, but come to find out, it wasn’t coffee he had in it, it was vodka. He swung the sheet around to be stabbed and he got my leg pinned between the sheets, luckily, he didn’t knock me off the top of the sheets. I told the piledriving foreman to put his oiler in the seat and get me down. When they did the operator had jumped in his truck and hauled butt!” exclaimed Sam. 

“Piledriving is a very dangerous occupation,” he continued. “My brothers and I had five personal friends, who were union piledrivers, that were killed on the job. My family worked union because it was safer and it paid more money. OSHA didn’t come into effect until 1971, and they didn’t get the workplace safer until the eighties. At least by working union you could go to your steward if there was a safety issue, and he would call the business agent and they would shut the job down until it was fixed. In 1968, my father and I were driving some H-beams for U.S. Steel at Tri-City Beach, Texas, on a graveyard shift. There were two rigs driving H-beams around the clock, five days a week. I went up the leads about two a.m. to work on the pile hammer and one of the rungs on the ladder pulled out in my hand. By the grace of God, I didn’t fall. When I got back down the whole job was shut down until everything was fixed; that’s why we worked union,” he stated. 

Building a Working Prototype

“After the Sam Rayburn job my brother Joe and I came back to Oak Island and started working on a prototype. We were still holding down our regular jobs so the only time we could work on the Stab Cat was after work and on weekends and holidays. We had an old boom truck and there is no telling how many times we picked up sheets and let them down. There was many an argument, but with the Glass brothers that was a regular thing. Some of my dental work was caused by my brother. We would lift the sheets up then climb the twenty-foot ladder to see if it would stab or thread. I told my grandson, David, who runs Stab Cat now; if we would have had a Go-Pro camera it would have saved about a year and 1,000 trips up and down that @#!! ladder,” laughed Sam. “Our friend and fellow pile driver, Scott Hale, would run the old boom truck. It had straight exhaust pipes and was really loud inside the shop. When the “eureka moment” came, after over a year of trying and failing and it finally stabbed every time, Scott shut down the old boom truck, went over and got us all a beer, and said, ‘Y’all quit arguing because it works!’ and it did from then on!” 

The Inspiration Behind the Invention 

“Most people would think it’s crazy that one simple little needle threader gave me the inspiration and fortitude to keep me and my brothers trying and failing and trying again. When my family lived in Baytown, Texas, we had a garbage route. It was really crude, my father had an old 2-ton international truck from his rice farming days, with a stake bed on it. My brothers, Eddie and Joe, worked the route on Saturdays. Joe was eleven years older than me and Eddie was thirteen years older than me. At that time, my father worked as a welder in Galveston Bay on the shell dredges. They were dredging up Hanna’s Reef fourteen days on and seven days off. When he was working, mother would drive the truck, she had a commercial driver’s license. In those days there were no garbage bags, so Eddie and Joe would hand the garbage cans up to the man in the bed of the truck. His name was Roy Hillhouse and he had a fondness for Gallo wine. Next to my parents and brothers, he showed me more about common sense than any person I ever knew. Roy would dump the garbage cans and if he saw something I might like he would hand it to me in the cab of the old 2-ton truck. I guess you could say we were mobile dumpster diving,” said Sam with a smile. 

“Once a month, mother would pull me out of school for a day, and I would go from house to house and collect the garbage bill payment. I saw a needle threader in a mail order magazine. I would buy them for fifty cents and sell them for a dollar. This was a good side hustle, and I was making a 100% markup. Not bad for a nine-year-old. Every time I would sell one of the needle threaders I would demonstrate it and it didn’t miss. When we were about to throw in the towel on our sheet threader idea, I would ask myself, If this inventor could put a sewing thread through the eye of a needle, we should be able to thread two steel sheets together.”

“We finally got the prototype built and we had a meeting around the kitchen table at Joe and Dorothy’s house. We three decided we better get a patent on the threader. Joe’s wife, Dorothy Glass, took care of the books and cooked many meals for us. We went through the Houston yellow pages and randomly searched for a patent lawyer. We picked out a lawyer by the name of Eugene Riddle. The law firm he was with handled mostly pharmaceutical patents. He was an older gentleman, and he was old school. Joe and I loaded up our prototype and headed to Houston. Riddle was on about the 50th floor of a building in downtown Houston. I guess from the time we met him he could see that we were not the suit and tie type and he took a liking to us and us to him. He asked if we had the prototype with us and we told him yes; it was in a truck in the parking garage. He went with us to look at it, and we showed him how it worked. He looked it over for what seemed like forever, then he said, ‘Okay, I’ll get the patent process started.’ Joe and I were so relieved that he took us on. He told us his guidelines for taking on a patent: First, it had to be marketable, and our Stab Cat threader was marketable. Second, the inventors should stick to their field of expertise and he said, ‘Y’all boys did.’ He said he would send an illustrator down to draw the prototype. He said the man he was going to send had such a heavy accent we would not be able to understand him, but that he had drawn illustrations for him for years. When the illustrator showed up, he was an older fellow, and he had a Russian accent. He placed a yardstick beside the prototype for size reference and free-handed the whole patent illustration while sitting on his artist’s stool. His wife had the same accent. While he was drawing, she walked two big Russian wolfhounds they had brought with them. They were to say the least, a unique couple and he was an amazing artist.”

Second Patent 5,618,135,135 ~ April 8, 1997

“In 1995, we applied for the second patent because the first Stab Cat was made of metal and was heavy. The second one is a composite of metal, aluminum, and high molecular plastic. We custom build this one to this day. Sheet pile threaders have been around since the 1930s but Stab Cat Universal Threaders are unique because: 1. It will set any module configuration of steel sheet pile with spacers and adjustments onboard the unit. 2. All crank and throw handles can be moved from left to right on the unit, so your crew stays in eyesight of the operator. 3. It will set corners, king piles, open cells, closed cells, set the last sheet in a cofferdam, and tie two walls together. 4. Has grade 100 safety chain where it can’t fall in case it gets pulled off the sheets. 5. The crew never has to lift it because it sets down on a dolly, either single beam dolly or double beam dolly, whichever is required, to roll up to the standing sheet close the wheels and connect the sheet to be stabbed and then reverse the procedure, release from the standing sheet and the set sheet and roll back and make ready for the next sheet. 6. The 4-wheel rods or axels are designed to bend if the wind is gusting perpendicular to the sheet pile wall at approximately 15 mph. 7. The stabbing gauge on the unit will set the throw distance if the contractor elects to not finger the bottom of the sheets.” 

“Now we had the patents to go into production mode. Brother Eddie came into the picture at this time, although the names Joe and Sam Glass are on the patents, Eddie was very much a part of the Stab Cat brand. Joe and I were still holding down our day jobs and brother Eddie was retired. Eddie would drive from Plaquemine, Louisiana to Oak Island, Texas every weekend and help Joe and me build the threaders and the rest of the week he would be demonstrating and selling them. All three of us brothers basically worked seven days a week. A couple of things that made Stab Cat successful are we knew we had a product that worked, and we knew a ton of people in the piledriving industry. All three of us brothers brought different talents to the table. At the time of the first patent we brothers, between us, had over 100 years of combined experiences in the piledriving industry working all over the world. Joe retired in 2000 at the age of 62 and went into business with Stab Cat full-time. I retired in 2015 at the age of 67 and went into the business full time. 

“On April 2, 1996, we were granted patent U.S. 5,503,503 for the Stompper Mandrel. The company my daddy and my brothers and I started working for was Raymond International. They were the biggest foundation company in the world. They drove piling under the Pentagon and every skyscraper around that has piling under it. It’s kind of hard to explain, but the pilings were kind of like step-tapered cans. These cans, they called them, were similar to corrugated culvert pipe. You might ask, ‘how are you going to beat a culvert pipe in the ground?’ They had a steel mandrel that went inside the piling. Using the mandrel, you didn’t beat the piling in the ground you pulled it in the ground. Joe, Eddie and I all knew this from working for Raymond. When you have a vinyl sheet of piling, you’re not going to just beat it in the ground, it’s just going to shatter and explode. We knew if we could put the steel in it first and make it adhere to the piling and get it down to where we wanted it, we could put any size plastic sheet on it and get it down where we wanted it. Then we’d pick the mandrel back up and put another sheet on it. That’s the theory we started with. Others had tried everything they could think of to drive vinyl piling, but they just couldn’t get them in the ground. The vinyl was made up of a composite of plastic, fiberglass, carbon, a hundred different things they put in it. It was necessary to use the vinyl in places where whatever you were trying to contain would attack a metal piling, and it worked,” exclaimed Sam. Sam’s brother, Joe was the one who introduced the idea of making a mandrel to facilitate driving the vinyl sheets. The brothers put their heads together and came up with the design for the Stompper Mandrel, for which they received a Pioneer Invention patent in 1996.

“When we started to patent the third patent the patent lawyer, Eugene Riddle, whom we had for the first two patents was retiring and referred us to Karen Tripp. We hit pay dirt again as far as getting paired with the right lawyer. She knew patent law backwards and forwards. She not only got us the patent but, she put our name in the hat for the Houston Intellectual Property Law Association (HIPLA) Annual Award in 2005. They gave out two awards that year and one was for our Stompper Mandrel. The other went to John M. Michaels, an inventor who worked for a large oilfield tool company. It looked like the company he worked for had about six in-house patent lawyers. Miss Karen could hold her own with any of the other patent lawyers. I gave the power point presentation, with the help of Joe’s grandson and my grand-nephew, Paul Davis setting it up. Bill White, the mayor of Houston at that time, gave us the Inventor’s Day Award,” noted Sam. A newspaper article reported at the time, “The Houston Intellectual Property Law Association has selected John M. Michaels of Baker Hughes and James “Joe” and Sam Glass of Stab Cat, Inc. as the winners of the Outstanding Inventor of the Year Award for 2005. The recipients were honored for their significant contributions to the Texas Gulf Coast and the country as a whole through the development of technologies used around the world. The Glass Brothers are being honored for their two patents covering their Stompper . . . The invention provides the only means to penetrate into sub soils supercharged with contaminated wastes and is especially appreciated when the site has been prepared by compacting several feet of selected fill, such as heavy clays and geo textile fabric. . . . Four hundred patent lawyers in HIPLA vote on the inventor of the year award.” 

“The first job we ever did with the Stompper Mandrel for money, believe it or not, was at the Wallisville spillway and dam (Wallisville Tx.) said Sam. “When you drive down the Wallisville levee road and cross where the spillway is and the gates as you go up to the locks, underneath those gates are those vinyl sheets. They’re about thirty feet long. I originally went to work there in the 70s after I returned from Vietnam, when they were building the dam. Where the gates are is the old original river. When we came into work, we came in from the west side; that was during the time they were moving the old town of Wallisville out and building the east levee. We built the locks and a big outfit that did it was Farrell Construction; they were big in strip mining up north. They had this huge Monighan crane with about a 15 cubic yard bucket on it. A guy in Anahuac named Cooter Renfro ran it. Red King . . . Steve King, he was the master mechanic Waldo King a surveyor, Lawrence Abshier dozer operator. I worked for Bobby McDaniel, he was the foreman; I drove all the wing walls steel sheets in the locks and the staging area south of the locks and five and a half miles of wood piling on 10’ centers which was supposed to be the spillway, from where the locks are all the way to Cove. Theoretically, it would have made a complete lake. There was a road, you could come in on this side and go all the way across Old and Lost River and come out on the hill at Cove. Most people don’t know it’s a man made cut that goes across there. We had a barge we put crossways, to use as a bridge, right there at the end of where the locks are. We had put gates in all those bayous, and they almost had the locks built, but when they got the injunction, they took them all out. The plan was to take the Wallisville Dam all the way across to Cove to dam up the whole end of Old and Lost River, but when a federal injunction was filed against it stating it was a hatchery for shrimp and other things, they stopped it. I think they got an injunction against it about three different times but I left and got another job after the first injunction; I liked it out there but you never knew when they were going to shut it down.  I worked there a little over a year. Stab Cat Inc. in 1997 put in the vinyl sheets using a Stompper Mandrel and vibratory hammer.). A vibratory hammer is different from an impact hammer because pulls all the moisture in the ground towards it which liquefies the soil right in front of the vinyl sheet,” explained Sam.

“There were three vinyl manufacturers in the United States at this time. One of them, CMI the other two were smaller companies. We would lease the Stompper Mandrel to them when they had a job. CMI wanted our mandrel, but we already had a patent on it. They tried every way they could to get around our patent, but after our lawyer wrote a letter to them CMI came up with the money to buy the rights to the patent. One of the big jobs we did with the Stompper Mandrel was right after 9-11. The city of New York would haul their garbage by barge out to Staten Island to the dump and it was reported there was leakage in the soil. We drove the vinyl sheets for them to seal off the leakage.”

The brothers received a fourth patent, U.S. 6,231,274 B1 on May 15, 2001, for a lifting device for composite sheet pile, and a fifth patent, U. S. 5,803,672, on September 8, 1998, for a hydraulic ram push off for composite steel. 

Stab Cat has also designed several Stab Cat shackles which are a type of ground-release shackle designed for the piling industry to safely release and reattach from the ground, eliminating the need for ladders or lifts. These shackles, made from heat-treated carbon steel, are used in applications like handling H piles, monopiles, caissons, and conductor pipe for oil wells. They feature a plunger design and can be operated from the ground via rope lanyards. 

“Stab Cat threaders have set miles and miles of steel sheet piles, and the Stab Cat Stompper Mandrels have sealed many super fund sites,” stated Sam. “Joe and I sold the rights for Stompper Mandrel to a vinyl sheet manufacturer, and it is still in use today. A few examples of projects that Stab Cat, Inc. has helped to build are: Wallisville, Texas--Stompper mandrel drove the vinyl sheets under the gates/spillway on the Trinity River; Beaumont, Texas--Stompper mandrel drove vinyl sheets under the gates/spillway on the Neches River at Beaumont, Texas; Levee-New Orleans, Louisiana--Stab Cat sheet pile threader and ground release shackles were used after Hurricane Katrina; Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, Kittery, Maine—P381 dry dock project; Ansul fire control, Super Fund site, Marienette, Wisconsin--Stab Cat Stompper mandrel was used; Driftwood LNG—Johnson Bayou, Louisiana; Cheniere LNG—Johnson Bayou, Louisiana; Rio Grande LNG—Brownsville, Texas; Golden Pass LNG—Sabine Pass, Texas.