Changing a car tire on your own can be a pain.

Now imagine if the tire is twice your height and weighs as much as a truck.

Darcy Goossen lives just outside of Ferintosh, about 30 minutes southeast of Maskwacis, and has been farming his entire life, and was tired of dealing with the pain of replacing a tire on a piece of farm equipment, which can be a risky operations involving a few people and another piece of machinery.

“They’re dangerous and heavy, and can be quite hard to manipulate…as everyone knows if they’ve changed a car tire before, a small car tire can be challenging enough to line up with the wheel studs, never mind a 6 or 7 foot high farm tractor machinery tires and trying to line them up with the studs.”

That was what inspired him to create The TireGrabber, an attachment designed for any forklift that's capable of lifting more than 1,800 kilograms, making it easy for one person to lift, rotate, and change a tire on any piece of farm equipment.

Goossen says it operates similar to a human hand.

“That’s what we built is a machine that you can pick up a tire laying on the ground. You can pick it up, stand it up, rotate it, and it also has a swing sideways movement on it...I’ve described it before like this; if you take your thumb and two fingers and how you would pick up a jar lid off a table, the jar lid represents the wheel and you can pick it up with your thumb and two fingers and stand it up, rotate it with your fingers, and also fling your wrist sideways, so it’s kind of got the full movement of your wrist, thumb and fingers.”

Goossen is making the tour of agriculture shows across North America, recently winning top prize at Canada's Farm Progress Show in Regina, voted best farm yard invention of the year.

His long term plan is to sell it to markets around the world, along with developing some more inventions he has up his sleeve.

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