September: I met the nicest clients named Michael & Meri Lenio who not only offered their hospitality while I worked, but also tipped me over $100. That was a first.

July: This is a copy of the interview for Angie's List we did for their July 2008 magazine about:

May: Angie's List sent out a photographer to our place to get shot to use in their article.

April: I got a questionnaire from Angies' List about how this recession has been affecting our business with doubling fuel costs and parts. It seems I was one of the only businessman to report I am doing better than ever, so I was contacted by their reporter to submit to an interview for their monthly magazine.

April: I got a huge contract to build 28 chimney caps for an apartment complex in Sunnyvale California, but I found I was working myself into carpel tunnel working all the hand tools; Tin ships and setting a good 500 rivets per unit every 2 days time. I finally looked into getting a pneumatic rivet setter. I wish I had done this sooner. It really has sped up my work. We have still been selling gutter jobs.

I had a serious scare in my 18 year old work car: the front driver's brake line blew out as I was coming into Down Town Portland on the freeway pulling a trailer with $2k worth of copper in it, slowing down suddenly for a traffic jam. I quickly swerved into the center emergency lane between 4 cars and the concrete barrier before getting the car under control with the parking brake handle. I limped it home with vice grip pliers clamped on the brake line and the other side front brake line blew just as I was getting off the freeway. After dropping off the trailer I drove the van out to the dealership that night to get a set of new brake lines and came home with a gold 2000 Acura TL with only 37k miles on it. The wife changed my plans to convert it to the next work car. She wanted the newer Acura and is giving me the Honda van to use instead.

March: We got a new $650 Bosch 10 gauge metal sheer to cut stainless steel screens for chimney cap fabrication. We had sold the largest copper gutter job of our career for a mansion in West Linn, but we had a lot of communication difficulties with the client. This has only happened one time before, but we decided to returned their 1/3 deposit of $8k to cancelled that contract, which helped open up room in our schedule for custom copper work. He was furious with us to say the least and threatened to sue us for over $40k, but that only showed us how it would have gone bad one way or another.

January: We have been getting so many orders for custom copper work that we are considering selling the gutter business or only doing gutter parts deliveries after we finish out current contracts for installations.

2005
November: We got a new $1k metal bender that is 4' wide and has a no limit depth. It can also bend thicker metal. I spray varnished the weathervane and mounted it on the edge on the gable roof over the living room

August: I bought a 34" long copper chopper weathervane from Good Directions for myself because it was so cool looking, but not sure where I will mount it. I added the copper flames behind the back wheel.

May: We got a set of rain cups for our house and a large copper Sun face from Good Directions with a clients order for a Merlin finial.

March: We signed a deal to be a retailer of weathervanes, finials, and rain cups for Good Directions.

January: We rang in the new year with friends. The political future seems more bleak and scary than ever, with our government having been taken over by criminals. If nothing else; if they had cheated their way into office by doctoring the election results in the previous election that clearly makes them criminals. So it is just a matter of trying to hang on and pray we survive the next 4 years. We wish you all well. Blessed be.

2004
November: We got an offer to buy http://jezzball.com from us to a PC game designer Mike Boeh for $600, so we no longer are the Webmaster for that site after 8 long years. I was never much of a gamer any way. That was one of the only PC games the peaked my interest. I ad not even really played it since before I published that web site. It took only a couple years for the other fans to knock me off my own high score pages, using my tips. <LOL>

October: We continued to have terrible problems with lunarpages.com web hosting, so we switched over to http://godaddy.com for our web hosting. Besides imroved e-mail services, they offers twice the storage and bandwidth for nearly same money.  We got another new domain name: http://dmr-gutters.com to replace our dmrgutters.com, and not have to spend hours each day sifting through thousands of e-mail because of spammers.  Now we hardly know what to do with all this free-time. <LOL>

July: Because of overwhelming spam problems to http://dmrgutters.com we had registered clear back in 1996, and our web host lunarpages.com failing to properly combat that issue, we decided to get a new domain name for our custom copper sheet metal fabrication business: http://copper-by-design.com, so we were then able to use quote@copper-by-design.com for our e-mail links instead of bid@dmrgutters.com.

The custom copper work has grown to be over half of our work now anyways.  I have spent several hundred hours this year updating these web site pages and adding thousands of digital photos to better communicate what we can do and how we do it.  We now have dozens of web pages showing step-by-step custom copper design and fabrication we have done recently.

In the early fall, we managed to sell plenty of gutter jobs, booking us out nearly 4 months, but the amazing part was that about half of them were for copper gutter jobs. Four in all, but that was over 2/3 of the revenue we brought in. I managed to take over 350 digital photos of the copper gutter job for the Kistlers out in Forest Grove Oregon. I was working there an entire month to install their copper gutters.

January: After a horrible snow storm like we had not seen around here before, where the snow had melted on top and froze over night to the point that children can walk on top of the snow without leaving a print in the snow. We decided to improve our standards to switch over to stainless steel screws and use 2 screws per hidden hanger, since the pressure of this snow that slide off metal roofs had broken a heft percentage of the screws we had used. We only had 2 houses that reported this sort of damage, but that was enough for us to change our standards for all jobs, even those without metal roofs. We decided to warranty our work, even though it was from excessive natural causes. You can read more about it on our web page: Snow Related Damage.

2003
December: Without raising our prices, we changed over to thicker downspouts for dent resistance, even though they cost us twice as much. We also found a good supply for stainless steel screws to use for gutter and downspout installation.

October: After over half a decade with PayPal on our web site for credit card transactions, we closed our account with them, due to their terrible customer service reputation and the bad reputation they had developed for randomly seizing merchants funds paid to them, to cover fraud their expenses.  We tried to find another source, but gave up working to opening up a merchants account to continue to receive credit card payments again. We still get very little call from clients for this service

September 1: After exactly 2 years we moved again to a better house w/a larger yard at 18675 Pilkington Rd. in West Lake Oswego, Oregon for a substantial improved location for Tia business.  We now have more privacy with much better merchant and freeway access.  It is also the first place we have lived in to have good cellular phone reception, so we were able to do away with our land lines once and for all!  Our old phone number: 503 256-7575 now rings to my mobile phone.

April: We began to fill orders for custom copper sheet metal roof caps for clients all over the country. So we gradually built up those web pages to better service those clients.

Febuary: We were with pair.com as our web hosting for a good 5 years, but switched over to lunarpages.com for better rates and more bandwidth, but our e-mail was a nightmare with the tens of thousands of spam and viruses we were getting each day through dmrgutters.com and mind-temple.com. Several hundred would still got through our 4 stage e-mail spam filtering. It was taking us several hours each day to scan through this mess.

2002
While sticking with the same company initials, logo, contractor's license number, and phone number that we had since 1993, we decided to make a name change from Dramatic Mobile Reproductions over to our current dba: Dynamic Metal Rendering, in order to better fit our custom sheet metal work specialty.
 

2001
September 1: We moved into a newer house at 1640 Carriage Way, in West Linn Oregon.  It was a better area for the kids and a better location for Tia's spiritual healing business (magickal-healing-arts.org) that she had slowly built up into full time work by earning one of the top reputations in her field in the N. W. USA.  She still enjoys working with me on gutter projects when she can get away, but she cannot afford to get her hands all sliced up on the sheet metal we have to work with.

We stopped advertising in the phone book due to this web site bringing us more and better clients these days.

May: I transferred the gutter machine over to a better trailer and built a 7' x 12' x 5' tall shell for the gutter machine, to continue to shield it from the weather. You can see it's step-by-step construction on our Gutter Machine web pages.

2000
November: Tia wanting to remain involved as much as possible, but due to the new baby, this was going to be a huge problem. So, as opposed to doing all the gutter prep work at the clients house, we began driving out to take the old gutter down first and get exact measurements. Then doing most of the gutter prep work in our work shop. The clients have not minded, since this mean a lot less mess and noise at home.

Here is a copy of our first large Yellow Page ad we place in 2000:

(it was far more costly than advantageous, so we discontinued it)

October 31: We had a baby boy we named Torrin Alex Zander Evan Rich. Yes, he came 5 weeks early to be born right on Halloween. My second Holiday child.

July: We moved over to a very beautiful old house and property in Clackamas, right on the Clackamas River with more privacy and a much better workshop.

June: We replace Tia's 96 Geo Metro with a new 99 Honda Odyssey van and got it set up to pull our trailers.

March: Tia decided she wanted to set aside her Nursing career to joined me in my business (see our Biography page for details).  DMR was again awarded this same honor from the Better Business Bureau for the following year 1998.  We were presented a glass trophy shown below (click on the award for more details).

October 1: Tia and I met on-line and swiftly acknowledged a soulmate connection.  We hand-fasted and exchanged gold rings only 2 weeks after our first e-mail, after having passed hundreds of e-mail, one short date, and long talks on the phone.  All before we had even kissed (see: 'The Beginning' for details).

May 24: My marriage of 14 years to Merryll finally ended. After having taken care of her for that 14 years, a PH D psychologist helped us get her on SSI mental disability benefits in 1998, just before running off with the money and the kids with help of her devious Sister, who then took advantage of her. Even with suffering these losses, that was one of the best thing that could have happened to me.

1997
I began to compete in the No-clog Gutter market with a product that is better installed, looks better, is functionally superior, and is also about half the price of the competition (see our 'Comparrison' web page for details).

Have you seen this car around Town over the last few years?

We have a most unique gutter truck, that now has over 229k mile on the original engine.  We feel it is more user-friendly, functional, drives better, and saves more gas than a domestic full size truck or van!  It may be unorthodox, but since people can clearly see that we could afford a truck or van, they are able to see that there may be reasons this works better for us, and see that perhaps I am a sharp cookie.  I would like to convert a new Acura TL w/an onboard navigation computer for this same work, but finances has not yet permitted.  This is in front of one of the 9 LDS chapels we did gutters work on.

I also got a domain name for this web site: http://www.dmrgutters.com/

I acquired the expensive roofing liability insurance to do high quality roofing. Unfortunately, too few Home-owners were serious enough about quality over price, and being such a small company that is not so quick and able to do the volume required to afford the extra cost, the insurance was far too costly to continue, so I dropped it in 98.

However, we have published some good advice about roofing on our 'Roofing' web page, so you can be a better informed consumer, and there for have a much better idea what to ask for from a roofing contractor.  This should help you weed out the disreputable contractors.

1995
I had our room-mate help us set-up and published this business web site on the Internet, well before it was common for small businesses to have a web site presence. We seemed to maintain the record of having the most comprehensive web site on gutters in the world. Even the largest franchise gutter company web sites pail in comparison to this day.

I helped inspire my Grandfather John Rich to attempt to redesign a lighter safety bumper than his Rich's Water Bumper they developed back in 1970. He came up with a replaceable honeycomb card board cell that is dipped in a resin to absorb the energy of an impact without the recoil effect.

1993
July: I filed for my specialty construction contractors license through the CCB in Salem Oregon; CCB #92250, and got the required liability insurance and bond.

March: We moved into a house we shared with a male friend of mine from the Star Trek fan group. He was helpful to watch over Merryll and the kids.

1992
February 14: We had our second child, another girl, named Ceair Carry Despra Talea Rich (see our family pages).  I decided to specialize in sheet metal gutter fabrication while with Contractors Construction.  Primarily rain-gutter replacement.

Even though I would not have my own gutter machine for a couple more years. I would purchase continuous gutter lengths as much as 61' long, and carefully transport them to the job sites. Over the next decade, I would continue to hold the record of successfully transporting the longest gutters in town and have not been pulled over for a related traffic violation yet. I also have managed to safely transport over 99% of those long gutters.

With this experience, I continue to deliver these long gutters to the job sites, instead of pulling the gutter machine trailer out there, as long as the gutters are less than 40' long or so. I have only needed to bring the gutter machine with me less than one in 5 jobs. especially when gutters are not suppose to be installed in lengths longer than 50' or so. Especially if it has a corner on the ends of it, since the expansion and contraction is different than the wood structure. I go to extra trouble to install expansion joints in these long gutter sets.

My Father Bill Rich was now selling over the counter health supplements. The core of his program is MSM, which is a digestible sulfur found in DMSO, without the harsh solvents that are not helpful and leave that bad after taste and smell.

1989
May 26: We had our second child; another girl we named Hope Lezly Rayzanna Alexandria Rich.

1988
April 19: Merryll and I had our first child; a baby girl we named Porsha Lea Crystal Rich.

1986
In the State of Oregon, I first registered Dramatic Mobile Reproduction as my dba, and designed the company logo (shown above) that we still use to this day.  Over the course of the next 6 years, I tried to make a business in graphic arts, photography, Honda 600 auto repair, speaker design, and handyman type work, while being employed by others; Texaco, Round Table Pizza, Acura, Chevron, Fred Meyers, and Contactors Construction (not all at the same time).

1984
March: I had to leave the auto repair occupation again, because of with-held wages and violence again from the boss. (it is funny that to this day our Honda 600 Car web page still gets more interest than any other of the 300 or so web pages Tia and I have authored across our 5 web domains)

1982
I had to leave this career, because of personal conflicts, violence and with-held wages by the boss, and since he owned all the tools, I was out of the auto repair business. I moved back to Utah.

1980/81
I decided to go back to Oregon for several reasons. One was the weather and the green foliage. But more importantly was the people here. I could no longer stomach the closed minded prudes who occupy that area.

I was tested in School to have a 99% mechanical aptitude. The advisor said that this test was not set to be able to give a 100% score, so I had the highest score possible and the highest she had ever seen. It sounded like that was a more difficult area for most people. My wood shop Teacher there in Milwaukie High School could tell I was bored with School, and he told me that his job in the Army as a Sergeant was to help young men pass their GED. He said Math was the only hard part for most men, but since that was no challenge for me, I could pass it without even a pre-test.

I tried it out on my 18th Birthday at the end of January, and passed it with ease. So right out of High School I got a job working in my Father's Auto shop called Rich's Repair, just to clean up after and assist the mechanics working there. I eventually got my driver's license, so I could go on parts runs to get the new parts needed by the other mechanics.  I worked there for a year to become the 1971-72 Honda 600 car repair specialist, with all the 3 local Honda dealers sending clients directly to me, because of my good reputation for honest and excellent work (and the fact that they no longer wanted to service those older cars). 

1979/80
I moved back to Utah for my Junior year because they did not have a good commercial art program in Washington/Monroe High School for the School District my Father lived in. I was really into art, and figured if I was going to do it for a living, I need to be able to make money at it. It wasn't until a few years later when I learned I would need to loose my soul to work in that type of occupation. It is not far above a Lawyer.

I managed to score a job at the one theater that had exclusive rights there in Salt Lake City Utah for the sequel to Star Wars.  I also managed to contract with the manager to make a life-size Darth Vader for the promotions of Empire Strikes Back.

1977/78
I moved to Oregon to live with my Father, again trading places with my older Brother John. It was my Sophomore year in High School. At 14 I got a worker's permit and a food handler's card to get a job at the Herfy's on 14th and Sandy. Later to be sold over to Arctic Circle. When I got my first pay check of $50, my friend from art class begged me to invest it in his business. He said he could double my money in a week. I offered him better terms of a 50% increase and 2 weeks to pay it back, but he had to give me his $80 skate board he had just bought (from stolen money from is Father's safe, I later learned). Needless to say, I kept his skate board. He had smoked away all his profit. <LOL> We are still friends to this day.

My Father was working at Sandy Boulevard Dodge as a mechanic. My Grandfather was developing a fire safety escape device for high rise buildings, and had me on Cannel 2 News scaling down the Fire Department's concrete fire practice building at 12th and Powell to demonstrate this device, so we had a safety net below me. He was inspired by the terrible fire in a large Hotel in Las Vegas, where the fire escapes were all locked to help prevent thefts, and a lot of people died in that fire.

1976
I spent my first summer with my little Sister in Milwaukie Oregon at Granny's Place where  my Dad was living. We took over our big Bro's paper route while he went to Utah. It was sort of a prisoner exchange thing. <LOL>

My Grandfather John Rich and Father helped launch Zee Medical First-Aid distribution. My Father also sold the first microwave ovens under the name Magic Chef.

1975
Parent figures separated when I was just turning 12 and we moved into a Motel since the house we were renting was being demolished to put in track homes.

1974
I began my entrepreneurial career selling greeting cards door-to-door. My Grandfather also paid us a penny for each door knob hanger we distributed to promote his baby feeder he called the Moon-spoon. It was a small squeezable plastic container that had a hollow tube with a spoon at the end molded into the lid. You put baby food in it and squeeze the food directly into the spoon for easy feeding and less mess.

My Father was running a Texaco gas station in Layton Utah to use the work bays for auto repair. He paid my older Brother John and me a dollar a day to pump gas. We took turns. That was back when a gallon of gas was only 25 to 35 cents.

I was working to get a new plastic skate board, to replace the one I made from an old short 2x4 with a single steel skate nailed under it. Boy was that a noisy ride. I had trouble getting it lined up just right too. It kept wanting to steer off to the left. I finally had ground the steel wheels down to the roller bearings. <LOL>

1973
In third grade I discovered I had a talent in art. The water bumper business was shut down by the government, since it interfered with big business, when the sales of new repair part for vehicles was hurt by the bumper sales.

My Grand Father was involved in designing TV chairs that you saw in airports and bus terminals. I have a scar in my left eye brow from goofing around in one of the hair-dryer TV chairs he made. It had a speaker built up inside the noisy hot air bell hood.

1969
My Grandfather; John Rich, with my Father; William, and his other Son; Milton developed the Rich Water Bumper for cars, buses, and trucks. They managed to sell them here in Portland for Police vehicles, and to Tri-met for the large City buses with the major insurance companies offering a 20% discount for those who had this safety bumper put on their vehicle. He was the first to develop a molding process to make these large hollow rubber cells.

We moved from Sacramento California to Fruit Heights Utah, to work at the factory being built in Salt Lake City. That is pretty much where I remember growing up. Dad had a large house built in a nice neighborhood, since the Water Bumper business seemed to be a huge winner.

The hardest sales issue was that most cars at the time still had chrome plated metal bumpers, and this was a very different look for the cars. If you think about it; the car manufacturers long before this had the technology to make a far superior bumper. The wheels on cars need a 3 part system to continually take the weight of the car versus the impact of the bumpiest roads without any damage occurring. One part is the spring to gradually absorb the impact. The second is the shock absorber to resist the recoil effect of the spring, and the inflated rubber to resist the damage between the metal parts and the road. Or the other car and other objects you might come in contact with.

So, you must ask yourself: Why after over 35 years since my Grandfather's work on this would all the major auto manufacturers still refuse to design this into their vehicles if it would save so much damage and the many lives? especially when they know that 80% of all accidents happen on the city street and parking lots at under 20 mph. That means a good 75% of all accidents would result pretty much as damage and injury free. It would be more like playing bumper-cars out there.

He could not work on such a level to incorporate his safety bumper into the frame, as it had to be an after market product, so he had to go a different route and simplify it, since people would not want to pay that much for an add-on part to their car. The hydraulic effect of just simple tap water in this rubber cell did the work of all three parts of the suspension, and could be simply bolted on with little difficulty for most cars. I have seen the films where they have a man sitting on the trunk of a car equipped with his water bumper, and have another car also with his water bumper mounted run into the parked car at 15 mph. Not only was there no discernible damage, but the volunteer had his legs between these two cars and did not hardly suffer much bruising. One volunteer even got the confidence to place his head between the two cars with a 10 mph impact, and again suffered no injuries.

At that time he also developed the 15' deep freeway divider safety barriers under the same sort of principals, that luckily are still being made and placed around the world, even if my Grandfather was not able to profit from that. Over a decades latter, I heard on the local news where a drunk driver had hit one of these dividers head-on at an estimated 70 mph, and was able to get out of the car and walk. The car was seriously damaged, but keep in mind that hitting a solid object at 20 mph is considered fatal. I believe that was still before air bags.

Sadly he was shut down, because his invention was cutting into sales of car repair parts. He did not have the clout to fight the large auto makers of the time and this development was squashed. I had inspired him to try to develop a lighter weight safety bumper in the 90s. He worked on a honey comb resin material to use in place of the water that would absorb the impact without recoil. He worked on it for several years just before his death, but had made quite some progress.

My Grandfather John Rich had developed the Rich's Frozen Food program that is still active to this day, but he told me how he decided to walk away from it all, because of the stress it caused in dealing with the management teams bickering over how that company needed to be run. He had also redesigned the refrigerator/freezer to be side-by-side, to give it smaller doors to fit better in a small apartment kitchen.

He was honored at a big company banquet just before he passed away. The original frozen bread dough was my Grandmother Edna's recipe. She is still alive today.