The KEFTY™ Story

by the inventor, Nick Musachio

Two clever farmers, an orphan, Leonardo da Vinci and the Space lab

My father used to tell me stories about Italy, the family vineyard, and Leonardo da Vinci.  Leonardo was an inspiration to me. He was an artist and an inventor. I was intrigued. I was described in school as very bright, but a dreamer. Later, as a young man, I spent a year in Italy. If you heard me speak Italian, you’d know I wasn’t studying Italian. I did see the vineyard however; just as described, it was like the garden of Eden. Really. No -I didn’t see  Adam or Eve, nor a snake in the apple tree. But many fruits, a stream, and a little stone hut to nap in.

My mechanical skills were born out of necessity. At fifteen my dad died. An only boy, with five sisters, my mother, and two spinster aunts. I became the fixer of broken things for three houses and a cottage. I still remember the first time I tuned the family’s Plymouth Satellite. For younger people, a Satellite is a car, and had nothing to do with outer space. I’ll get to that later. The car bucked like a rodeo bull.

Mechanically, I got better. Superman could look through steel and disturbingly, Lois Lane’s dress. I became almost as good. In a way I can look through sheet metal and see how machines work. Don’t test me on it. And don’t worry Lois, sheet metal is my limit.

My first invention was an electric roadway system. It was a means of powering electric cars from a 3 inch wide strip on the roadway. You can see a video of the prototype on youtube. It was called E-tran. That’s as far as it got. Maybe someday. While researching E-tran,  I helped my father-in-law work on his version of an ab-crunch machine he saw on TV. Ed Schmit was a farm boy, who used his mechanical abilities to build stone cutting machines. I went home and came back with a “U” shaped device that had tension in both directions. Ed and I worked on prototypes for about a year. Then he passed away.

Years passed and I worked on KEFTY with what funding I had and not so long ago, I decided KEFTY had waited long enough. One way or another KEFTY was going to be made. I started working with an engineer named Ralph Keen, who grew up on a farm, and became a 3M engineer.

Ralph and I worked hard for about a year working the details of the carefully designed machine, technically called the: kinesthesic exerciser for transforming yourself–we just call it KEFTY. We think it’s a thing of beauty. We hope you do too.