Mo. inventor prefers to stay close to home

JOPLIN, Mo. -- Even behind a desk, Marty Blotter can't hide the grease under his fingernails, and he wouldn't have it any other way.

Blotter could have chosen any number of futures for himself. A graduate of the University of Missouri-Rolla with a degree in engineering, he did his internship in metallurgy with the U.S. Department of Energy in Washington state.

Over the years, Blotter worked independently for an engineering consulting firm in Siloam Springs, Ark., for Epoch, Tamko, Leggett & Platt and for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But Blotter doesn't work for the government or a large corporation anymore.

He feels more comfortable in his Joplin workshop tinkering with inventions and solving people's automotive problems rather than garnering glory for himself.

RIGHT: Marty Blotter showed the replacement hinge he created to stop sagging car doors Jan. 17 in Joplin, Mo. (Roger Nomer ~ The Joplin Globe)

Blotter, 44, was born in Joplin and, despite his travels and job opportunities, he said he has never had any desire to live anywhere else. He spent most of his youth growing up on a local farm and said he's always been fascinated with machines.

Starting early

One of his first memories is watching the pistons in a tractor engine move up and down and being completely in awe.

"Supposedly, my first real word was tractor," Blotter said, laughing. "It was real frustrating for my parents because every time they would get me a toy, I would take it apart."

Blotter's first mechanical project was repairing an abandoned lawnmower engine his father picked up at a dump. When it came to him, it was a piece of trash. When Blotter was finished, it ran like a dream.

"My uncle Ellis was the fix-it guy in the family, and he bought me my first tools and really encouraged me in that," he said.

In high school, Blotter said he was successful, but not popular. He was good at math, but preferred to crunch numbers with his hands in the workshop, rather than with his mind.

"I didn't like school," Blotter said. "I was good at it, but I didn't like it."

After his success in college, Blotter said he probably could have gotten a good job doing government research and been set for life. But instead he chose to stay independent, doing product-liability assessments and designing safety devices for large machines.

"I could replace brake pads all day, but I would go crazy," he said. "There's just no way I could do that."

Just to keep things interesting, Blotter picked up his already unconventional life and moved his family -- wife Tammy and four children, ages 11, 9, 6 and 2 -- to Louisiana for two months after Hurricane Katrina so he could live as a lumberjack cutting down damaged trees.

Love for invention

But all the jobs have just been ways for Blotter to pursue his real passion: inventing.

Sometimes the ideas come after much thought, other times he said he wakes up in the morning with an epiphany.

Some of his current inventions include a furnace that heats his workshop by using any type of oil, from used vegetable oil to crude. He is currently pursuing a patent on the machine.

He has also created a bolt that could solve the problem of sagging car doors, a simplified version of a machine used to align auto tires and an overgrown potato launcher.

His achievements haven't been without failure, a lesson Blotter said every aspiring inventor should learn. His prized invention, a furnace that burns used oil without creating soot or putting sulfur into the air, is currently in its second model and Blotter thinks he could still make improvements.

"Every time you fail, you learn something about it that you didn't know before, so hopefully, somewhere down the road, you have something you can live with," he said.