Wireless pickle

Bob Blackwood, 62, is supposed to be retired at this point in his life. But his hobby for blasting shotguns led to a second career as a maker of accessory products for gun clubs and shooting ranges.

Blackwood's Carson City-based Black and Ivy Inc. designs gun club accessories with the shooting club staff in mind. Black and Ivy's top-selling item is the "wireless pickle," a radio device that signals a club's numerous target-throwing devices to launch a clay pigeon.

Blackwood says a wireless signal device eliminates the need for a host of extension cords to each throwing station and makes changing the location of stations easier. Relocation of the target-throwing machines makes repeated trips by a shooter to the same club a different experience.

"People who shoot want to see something new," he says. "And in places where it snows, the cords may be buried under 18 inches of snow. If you want to move the machines, you have to dig the darn things up to move them. If you are in the Southeastern part of the United States, where the cords lay on the ground, because of the electrical storms there they become a huge antenna laying on the ground."

Blackwood's device also counts the number of clays thrown, helping shooting ranges better track inventory.

"The fact that it counts targets is a key benefit to the gun club," he says. "Most clubs run between 12-18 percent shrinkage. You have some broken targets, but that means people are shooting targets and not paying for them."

Blackwood says clay pigeons only cost about 6 or 7 cents each, but by the time they are fired in the air at a gun club overhead costs push that figure to about 21 cents per target.

The self-funded venture started in 2004 when Blackwood retired after owning a company that made processing equipment for the semiconductor industry. When a local gun club decided to upgrade its shooting course, Blackwood found the products on the market severely lacking in quality and performance, so he designed and built his own.

Progress into profitability has been slow as Blackwood spent much of the past three years perfecting the wireless pickle. He says making the radio-frequency system function reliably in adverse conditions proved difficult. After 18 months of research, he thought he had a workable system only to discover a 25 percent error ratio during a 24-hour test. That number has since been reduced to 1 percent.

"Getting it from design to manufacture, all those issues are pretty well put behind us," he says.

Marketing challenges, meanwhile, include higher price points and the fact that gun club owners typically rig their own setups.

"Probably my biggest fault is that I refuse to build junk, and as a result my prices are higher than everybody else," he says. "That is part of the dilemma of breaking into this industry.

"Most gun club owners are shade-tree mechanics using half-baked stuff. I have to convince them that the higher price they pay for my products is justified in the net performance of the product. It's like Macy's competing with Wal-Mart."

Blackwood subcontracts work to Carson City-based manufacturers and assembles and ships products from his home-based workshop.

In addition to the wireless pickle, which costs about $1,200, Black and Ivy produces gun stands ($550), scoring podiums ($500), and an innovative trolley for target-throwing machines ($600) that features adjustable legs for variable throwing positions, a battery box and solar charger.