The Journey from Lane Oil Chaos to Perfect Patterns

In this episode of The Engineering Passion Express, we take you on a journey from a time when no two bowling lanes played the same due to hand cleaning and oiling inconsistencies, to an era where precise patterns could be put down using machinery, and those patterns would determine how the game should be played on a given night. It's a study in picking the right problems to solve and finding a life's work where no one else may be looking.

This episode is about the invention of the lane oil machine for bowling alleys. If you are a bowler, you are likely equipped to understand all the topics in this episode, if not, you don't necessarily need bowling knowledge as the key items you may not understand are explained. If you have no clue what bowling even is, as a passionate bowler myself, I would encourage you to learn more about the game!

For this episode, I'm speaking to Don Agent, long-time employee of Kegel, the leading lane oil machine manufacturer in the world. He shares his insights of working with Kegel's founder John Davis, as they traveled the world, showing bowling proprietors how to improve the sport through use of specialized equipment and the creation of standards. 

Show Notes

• Here is a link to Kegel - https://www.kegel.net/
• Here is an example of a lane oil pattern
• Here is what a modern lane oil machine looks like.
• Here is an article about lane topography
• Here is a quick video demonstration of topographical effects on a bowlers shot
• You can find a picture of the initial product, "The Key", here. Scroll down to the bottom under the year 1981.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Concerning the bowling industry specifically, he was a people magnet. And I literally was very fortunate to be able to experience that and traveled extensively with it extensively with him around the world and the country for many years. If you wanted to talk bowling or anything learning related with bowling, uh he'd lend his ear 100%. I remember one time a bunch of us were sitting at his house or we're having a couple of beers, and all of a sudden we were talking about topography and the laying machines, and somebody just piped up and said, Hey, can we talk about something else? And John just froze and he said, My God, what else would there be to talk about?

SPEAKER_00: 1:54

And this is episode one, season one, where we are focusing on starting something new. In this episode and the following, we'll be discussing how to pick the right problem, and we'll be giving two wildly different case studies. In the opening, you heard from Don Agent talking about John Davis, a man who revolutionized the sport of bowling through the invention of the lane machine. I picked John Davis as the subject of this episode because I love the sport of bowling, and because it's a great example of picking a problem where no one is currently looking at Imagine yourself in the 1970s, where people are walking around in bell bottoms, you can hear the sound of a disco, cigarette smoke is wafting through the air, and polyester is king, whether in clothes or bowling balls. In the 1970s, bowling alleys were a great place to meet up, and they were filled every evening with people in leagues looking for some fun competition. John Davis is working as a pin setter mechanic and as a lane man, a person who oils the lanes. And back then the lanes were wooden, and the oil helped protect it and prevent cracking, and lowered the wear and tear as balls rolled down the lanes. Over time, it was noticed the oil highly influenced a ball's path down the lane, since lower or no oil spots create high friction, and highly oiled spots have no friction. That's when the lane man's job became more difficult. He needed to put oil out on the lanes that created an enjoyable playing environment. However, as John walked the center as the leagues came to an end for the night, all he heard were complaints. These lanes were awful. Neither lane played the same. He wanted to do better, except there were no guides, there were no rules of thumbs, there wasn't even standardized equipment to do so. But John Davis stepped in thinking like an engineer. John would first revolutionize the cleaning of the lanes with an invention called the key. He would then go on to create the lane oil machine that could apply oil with precision in different volumes from side to side and front to back of the lane. Today we call this a lane pattern. If you're interested in seeing some of these lane patterns, I put a link to some in the show notes. After creating his lane oil machine, John would go on working with the Professional Bowlers Association, or PBA, and change the way the game was played. In this episode, you're going to hear from Don Agent about the journey and some of the challenges and successes of the problem solved by John Davis. It's likely that you need to know one more bit of information, a word that you'll hear, and that's topography. In bowling, we consider lane topography the shape of the lane as nothing is ever perfectly fat. So there can be crowns or depressions in the surface of the lane, or even the overall lane itself could be sloped from right to left, left to right, front to back, back to front. And this also creates inconsistencies in the same way lane oil does. It wasn't always well understood that topography played a role, but eventually it was found out after John Davis had solved the lane oil issue. A quick disclaimer about this episode. It's going to sound like this is an episode about bowling, which due to the invention and the nature of it, it is. However, that's partially because often the engineering of a product or a solution cannot be separated from the industry itself. A lot of the stories that you've heard about as far as engineering successes are the ones that apply to just about every industry. The invention of the computer. Those sorts of successes are industry spanning and revolutionize the entire world. But one of the points of this episode is the fact that you can revolutionize a small segment of the world and have other people appreciate it. And that by looking for those little opportunities, you have the opportunity to carve out something big for your own life. With that, let's get into our discussion with Don Agent of Kegel to talk about his founder, John Davis, who unfortunately passed away in 2013. Out of the articles I've read, John wanted to make two lanes playing the same, play consistent. Did he ever talk about a point that was the breaking point of I have to do this?

SPEAKER_01: 6:57

There was. When lanes were different, they were different from an engineering standpoint. Say they're one or two boards different. So a board is about one to one and a sixteenth of an inch in width on a bowling. The complaints were there, but not to the magnitude they are today. Ironically enough, though, the there was a breaking point. And some of the viewers, younger ones may have may never have heard of this product. But essentially, one day John went to clean his lanes, and back in that time, we used T-bars, which was basically a piece of wood with a weight on it, with a handle on it, the width of the lane, you wrapped a towel around it, and you had water in the towel with some type of cleaner. In this case, people were using spick and span pointer. He ran out. There was no dramatic moment. He was like, oh my god, I'm out, but I still have to do this procedure. And he decided, I'm just going to use straight water. And he's pushing the T-bar down, and he manipulated the position of it a little bit. And light bulb went off, and he watched the oil actually bead up because oil and water don't mix. He beat it up off the lane in front of the towel. And then by the time when he got to the lane and did a certain maneuver, it scooked it up. He was like, wow, unbelievable. From that standpoint, he took what he saw and what he felt, and he went back and they built these things literally at the house. His wife sewed the towels for these. While the little kids were playing, because they had three kids. This was a family that was not born into money. It was essentially the reality of necessity as a mother of invention. Banged off and he went back and he perfected a tool based on some of the motion and the visual observations he saw. And boom, he they sold like gangbusters. That was the key, right? Yes, sir. Do you have any idea how much those cost back in the day? Believe it or not, yes, and we also still sell them. The key was created in 1981, essentially, for sale, Pat did the whole deal. They were retailing, depending on who you were,$300 to$350. And when I say when I say depending on who you were, he was from the Midwest and his family. And so in the beginning, he made probably lower cost deals, but he did.

SPEAKER_00: 9:32

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 9:32

With friends of him and his own community. And when he had moved to Florida, he did as well.

SPEAKER_00: 10:08

If you made four to five of them in a month, assuming they were high margin items, you could scrape by for a family. If you made more than 15 of them in a month, you were probably doing well. As Dawn mentioned, they were making these at the house as a husband and wife duo. Making fifteen in a month meant producing four a week or so, which seems doable. But then the magic happened, and they received an order for 700 all at once. That would be like getting an$800,000 order today. Can you imagine going from such a humble husband and wife manufacturing from home operation to big time with one order? That's what picking the right problem and going after it does. Every day staying in business is another day closer to getting lucky. And when that luck strikes, you have an opportunity. Cash out or double down. You know what John did? He bought a bowling alley. It became another way for him to make money, it acted as his research center, and it allowed him to better relate to all the other bowling proprietors, because he didn't have to imagine what it was like to be a bowling alley owner anymore. He was one. The lane oil machine is a piece of equipment that runs down the lane and sprays oil in different volumes across the boards based on how it is programmed. This creates a lane pattern. In general, a standard lane pattern, often called a typical house shot, is going to have a higher volume of oil in the middle 20 boards and a lower volume of oil on the outside 10 boards of both the left and the right side of the lane. It will be ran from the foul line to about 36 feet or up to 44 feet in most centers, depending on other factors like lane surface friction and other maintenance considerations. In the show notes you can find an example of a lane machine, and you can see the program that is used to tell the machine what to lay down. Do you have any insight on that?

SPEAKER_01: 12:59

The best way I can answer that is number one, uh there was no risk. It was actually the next logical step in the process. Okay, from a lanesman's standpoint, if John was alive, he'd tell you the same thing because what comes out of my mouth is exactly what he taught me. 80% of people's problems when we get phone calls and tech support start out as lanes aren't playing right, condition is horrible, I need to change oil, blah, blah, blah. But once we start fine-tuning it, it's cleaning related in the end. So I used to say you can't paint a Mona Lisa on a piece of toilet paper. You've got to have a canvas. Okay. So by John creating the key and the cleaning capabilities, it allowed him to have a canvas. But now he didn't have a really good paintbrush because of the methods that existed. So now he's got this beautiful canvas, and he says, I got to come up with something to paint on this. That was the next evolution. What if I can guarantee now? I can guarantee the lanes will always be clean. That variable's gone. What if I can guarantee that the application is the same on every lane? That variable's gone. Lanes may play different due to topography and all these other things, but our the goal was always to take out as many variables as possible so that we could look at a fellow bowler and say, hey, listen, we did them the same. They're identical. And if you're feeling a difference, let's sit down and have a conversation because there are other reasons why this is probably the case.

SPEAKER_00: 14:38

John had a history of working with the PBA, and I've read different things over the years, but it's a little muddled as far as my knowledge of the history and the back and forth between it. What was the PBA doing before Kegel came around? And what was the synergy between the two? Who took more away from the other, do you think?

SPEAKER_01: 14:54

Both entities got wonderful benefits out of it. Now it depends on what bowler you talk to. As I used to say, I had 124 new enemies and one new best friend.

SPEAKER_00: 15:05

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 15:05

You know, because when we took over the tour, it was full-time around 1995. I started in 96, so I went out there for a period of years. Um but John was trying to help Wenny, Steve Cross, Carrie Mogart, these were Ron Marshall, who unfortunately is no longer alive, but that was the original core group that started Lane Maintenance for the PVA Tour. Before that happened, they went from center to center, and hey, whatever the mechanic did, or whatever was there, there wasn't any consistency or statute until that program started. So that's what they did prior to us coming in, as our equipment developed. All of a sudden we found, or the the sport found that equipment could create more consistency than the human. As good as Winnie and C. Cross and Lawn Marshall and Jerry Mogar were at what they did, everything was hand application. You're talking applying oil with a spray gun, a bug spray.

SPEAKER_00: 16:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 16:01

Cross-wiping, dragging a pattern out, and you gotta do 50 lanes of this and trying to make them all quite the same. Literally, it's not even an attainable goal for most. I don't think anybody else on this plant would have been able to do it. But in the 90s, when John had gotten to this level of equipment and he started to really extend the company, add a team of the people like myself and the tech sport group and our chemist center Dennis Shears and a lot of other people, then it was like, okay, I got something where I can definitively say we can make this better. So he actually approached the tour. We never got paid in the beginning of those days to do lands. We did those three all of my payroll, my expenses, travel, company vehicles, anything. That was covered by junk. But equally, I think both entities benefited because essentially, now I would go into Volume Center or one of my colleagues to a tournament, and the whole neighborhoods watching that machine were watching the reaction on that lane. Where can I get it? Honestly, for us, I can honestly say back then, it was a huge benefit for us, one or something. There was a point that they also allowed us to gather data that we would not have been able to get on our own. Because we essentially were able to go to all these different places under their blanket, measure lanes, look at different surfaces, different topographical situations, climate, all these things, as we started putting these together across all these years, then all the things I think John thought about from the 70s and 80s clicked and made sense and went, okay, I got proof. Okay. Was the public ready to hear that? I don't think so. I don't think it was very well received. It was by specific bowlers, but not as the masses. Whereas today, yes. But people understand, wow, topography has an effect, even say because of social media or access to information, what have you. But back then I think they were still sketchy. Yeah, you're just trying to come up with an excuse because you didn't do your job well. And it wasn't the case. We we were able to prove that seven hooked more than eight because seven went uphill an inch and a half from the foul lane of the pending, and lane eight went downhill three inches. And there was no written specification for that in the guidelines of our sport. But as an engineer, you'll understand that gravity and coefficient refrictions and all these things end up taking over.

SPEAKER_00: 18:50

And what he's referring to is that there's factors outside of the lane oil that contribute to how a ball goes down the lane. So things like temperature, surface condition, the way the lanes are constructed, maybe your building has settled differentially from one end to the other, and so the lanes are actually tilted right to left or left to right. All of these became factors, factors that bowling proprietors necessarily wanted to hear because the fix to them was so much more expensive than a lane oil machine. Imagine having to re-level 50 lanes, unscrewing all the different wood pieces, and then put shims in at multiple different lengths down a 60-foot lane to make sure that they're 100% level. That takes a lot of effort and a lot of cost. As time progressed, these things were understood better, and sometimes they were dealt with, and sometimes they were left alone and just treated as it is what it is because the cost is too much to change. At one point in time, nobody thought about the effects that this stuff was having on the lanes. John Davis and the company he founded Keggle were the ones that were sort of saying. Well, we know this is the case. We've done the testing. For all the engineers out there who desire to invent things, I think the most common problem that holds them back is the worry of how will I sell this? I think they're confident in their abilities to invent products and build useful items, but they're not always confident in how do they sell these and move these products and turn a product invention into a company. With that, I've asked Dawn to go through and really highlight how this useful invention of the lane oil machine, which automated the oiling of lanes and made them more consistent and better, how it was sold and how it was adopted. One thing that I've noticed is, and this is even after I started bullying, which was also in the 90s, lane maintenance seems fairly high in quality in most centers today. That happened over time. What do you think made it so ubiquitous that everybody had to adopt it? Was it just competition amongst the centers?

SPEAKER_01: 21:32

You actually you pretty much answered the answer I was going to give you. Essentially, back in the mid-90s when I was still doing installations for the company, you would get a sanctioned technology machine, Phoenix S, a sanction two, but that first high-end machine that he had built for the ability to have absolute control, if I went into, let's say, Chicago, anywhere, and put one in, within about six to eight weeks, if there were 12 bowling centers in Chicago, six of them had called and said, We gotta have it. And it was literally when you seated one in an area, because as a bowler, whether you feel the swear or not, but obviously being around it, people want to score well. They don't want to not bowl well and go home and be miserable. So they gravitate sometimes. And especially back in the 90s when sanctioned technology really came out in mass scale, and you dropped one in an area. We used to laugh when we got home. We're like, oh, we'll wait and see when the phone rings. I knew when I left that bowling center was gonna call me in a day or two and go, My God, my friend down the road that's got a center is going nuts, he's gonna call you.

SPEAKER_00: 22:45

It changed the playing field. What you're talking about is the dream of any company making a product, right? One sale leads to other sales and it grows exponentially.

SPEAKER_01: 22:55

And his main purpose with that was that anything he's ever made was to solve a problem. That was it.

SPEAKER_00: 23:02

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 23:02

And it was always about the sportable.

SPEAKER_00: 23:20

And they knew that if they sold one into an area, they would get many more orders. I call this being in the weapons business, not in the figurative sense of something that harms people, but in the sense that by creating this product, you create unfair advantage for the person that buys it. And as a result, their competition has to buy it, and the cycle goes on and on and on in a figurative arms race. That's where most engineers should strive if they want to invent a product and pick a problem where they know they can improve something so drastically, it will become ubiquitous. And I can think of a number of things off the top of my head where this has been the case for engineers. If you think of computational fluid dynamics software for aerodynamics, there's not a aerospace company in the world that's not using some form of that. And that's because it made things so much better, so much more cost efficient than testing, that it just had to be adopted by anyone to become competitive. And there's all sorts of problems out there in this realm you can be tackling if you just pick correctly. One thing that shouldn't be underestimated when it comes to picking the right problems to solve is the need to make everyone feel better. Once people realized the lane machine made week to week more consistent at league, players were happier and proprietors were less worried about people quitting, which made them happy too. As a bowler myself, it seems silly to say, but a great night at league has me feeling good the next morning still. And a bad one has me questioning why I keep playing this sport. And I'm one of the most avid players you'll meet. So if I'm questioning why I keep doing it, you can see where proprietors would get worried about people that just want to give up. Do you think someone else would have or could have built Kegel? Or do you think he was that unique?

SPEAKER_01: 25:33

I love this man dearly, so I'm gonna say no. As Don Agent, but as somebody that also has traveled for this company has has met some unbelievably brilliant people in this industry globally. I'm gonna say like anything. Yeah, if Einstein hadn't lived, would there have been another one? Maybe not on Einstein, but there would have been I think, yes, there would have been somebody that would have tried to take up a challenge. And I believe that I've met people that were capable of that in my travels. I just think that the amount that he sacrificed, both personally and professionally, to just literally try to get two lanes to play the same, I don't think most people would have the stomach for. I traveled the world and I know all three of his children very well. There was a large portion of his life that he wasn't able to do like a lot of successful business people, but wasn't able to be there every day and play the kids or everything was full, everything was well. Going back to what are we gonna talk about? What would we talk about? That was it was that was literal. No, I don't think so to this capacity, but I think yes. There there are definitely people that that had the same passion, and it would have definitely made a dent.

SPEAKER_00: 27:11

You just heard Don mention that he thought there's other in the bowling world that could have tackled this challenge of making two lanes play the same, much as John Davis did. I think that's an important component of anybody who wants to do anything related to engineering. You likely have the skills, especially if you're a degreed engineer today, which John Davis was not, but he thought like one. You likely already have the skills, but what you need is you need to be picking the right problems to work on and the right ones to tackle. No one is going to send you an invite to solve the most interesting problems. In fact, the people that often come up with the most interesting problems to tackle are the ones that want to take those problems on themselves. John didn't say, I have this problem, two lanes don't play the same. Let me hire somebody to lead up the investigation of this. He let it up himself, but he did hire a few other people to help him look at areas that were maybe outside of his knowledge or expertise. He did start to hire people to look at lane oil chemistry and items like that that maybe weren't common knowledge. You have an opportunity today to do something amazing if you just pick the right pattern to work on this brings me to the question that you said was interesting. You think about a thin layer of oil on a lane and it seems like a small problem. But today you hear everybody's aiming to revolutionize things with artificial intelligence and going to space and colonizing Mars or whatever. Do you think there's not enough people like John who are just looking at a small problem and saying, even though this seems small, there's a life's work here. There's a lot going on here. 100% agree with that.

SPEAKER_01: 29:13

As a mechanic personally, I've always felt that the little things that go unobserved are usually the largest problems that exist or will create the largest problems. I'm a Penn Center mechanic by trade before I came into this portion of the industry. So for me, you can have a little bearing in a ball wheel guide roller that helps keep your ball wheel rolling, and that goes out, and then it takes out the bearings in the lower ball wheel guide rollers, and then it creates stress on the lift rods. So in the end, the little$3 bearing created$1,000 worth of damage. Yeah. Yeah. And that was another thing that was just phenomenal. John is using mechanic first, honestly, Ben Center mechanic person foremost when he looked at things, much like his brother Mark Davis, my dear friend, and was my boss for many years. So we always people tend to look at the big picture first when let's see what created the big picture. So yeah, I think honestly, the world needs more people to sometimes step back and go, hey, maybe this giant problem we got is only because of this little thing. Going back to the phone calls again. Lanes are plain inconsistent. I've changed oils, my bowlers are going nuts, I'm going to close the bullets there. And then we're on the phone with them, and we find out they got a clogged cleaner filter, and they're not spraying cleaner on the lane, had nothing to do with the oil account. As far as the oil system, it in turn affected the ball reaction oil gap. But one little tiny thing as a filter created thousands of dollars worth of havoc and people that are on sets. I mean sometimes with today's technology, we gotta step back. I'll be honest with you. I'm still old school, a lot of things, as I was trying to hook up off that. I still write with a fountain pen. Um, I still have notebooks, and and I still look, listen, and feel. And I think it's still important, even from an engineering standpoint, to not forget that the littlest shiniest thing can create the biggest problem. You've got to have your eyes on everything.

SPEAKER_00: 31:23

There is so much to unpack from that conversation. As far as picking the right problems go, here are some learnable lessons from John Davis and his founding of Kegel. First, John had an end goal. Making two lanes played the same was always the goal, but he didn't tackle it at once. He picked something he knew he could make better. He made the key for cleaning the lanes and began selling it as a product. And that was something simple that he could start with. For number two, with an early product success, he was able to manufacture them at home, which kept the overhead low. Some people imagine starting out and becoming entrepreneurial to be much grander than this, and it prevents them from finding success. Humble beginnings are almost always the secret to great successes. And third, successes from the simpler items created funding for the more complex. By selling the key, John created his opportunity to develop a lane oil machine. No doubt the lane oil machines were capital-intensive in their RD, as today they sell for five figures. However, having a thriving business building the keys and owning a bowling alley provided him the money needed to do RD and the lane oil machine. And the takeaway here is that people underestimate the exponential potential of solving problems. Each time you do it, you get a new level of capital to fund a bigger problem that you can solve. To this day, while being a much bigger company, Kegel continues to research bowling lane surfaces, topological effects, lane oil chemistry, the physical mechanics of players, and much more. They aren't done learning even though John Davis has passed. You can hear the great respect Don has during our interview for John Davis. While he didn't say this to me directly, Don talks about getting to travel the world and holds the work he did in high esteem. By picking the right problem, John Davis gave many like Don and other Kegel employees a purpose and allowed them to make a contribution and be around a sport they love on the daily. And that in itself, giving people something that makes them happy to do on the daily is something to strive for. Thank you to Don Agent for allowing me to interview him. He was very kind to share his experiences with us on the podcast, and we could not be more grateful to be a bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit. I hope that we can keep improving this. What I'd like to do is build a community around this podcast of engineers that are excited about the problems they work on and that can bounce ideas off one another. In furtherance of that goal, I'd appreciate it if you had a listen today. If you're not already connected with me, go on to LinkedIn, search the Engineering Passion Express podcast or Brandon Donnelly, find my profile, and send me a LinkedIn request. I will be posting notes and episode updates and additional topics on LinkedIn. So if you connect with me there, that will help start our community. And at some point we'll figure out if there's additional avenues that we can help share our knowledge through. The next episode is planned to launch in two weeks. I hope that you subscribe to this podcast and that you'll be back for that episode. It will continue on the topic of picking the right problem, but rather than looking at a topic where John Davis focused in on a very small, narrow industry, it will be somebody who picked a broad, overarching problem, but actually didn't succeed. And we'll discuss where they maybe went wrong, how they could have tackled something rather than sort of leaving it where they were. I'll see you again on our next journey to the engineering passion express. Thank you for listening.