The creation of a Gallatin Gateway inventor is helping Montanans stay in hot water.

Mike Stoner has invented a handy new cleaning device for hot tub owners, called the GritGitter. The device, now marketed nationally, is truly Montana-made. The demonstration kit for use by retail stores even offers a bit of packaged Montana grit to help show customers how it works.

The product grew from one man's drive for personal growth, a willingness to network with others, and production help from a number of Montana quarters.

The product idea was born several years ago at Bozeman Chamber of Commerce's entrepreneurial course Fast Track.

Stoner, a retired hydraulics software company owner, had enrolled in the course "for mental stimulation" and found that he needed a potential product in order to carry out the course. That course, now known as NxLevel, for Entrepreneurs, is cosponsored by the Montana Small Business Development Center and underwritten by U S West and a number of area businesses.

The grit remover, a small, hand held, bulb-shaped apparatus, operates with just a squeeze using suction and hydraulic valve principles that pull sand, small pebbles and other particles out of the tub and away from tight corners, dips, and filter compartments in today's hot tubs. Bathers stay in the water the whole time. For Montanans in winter, this has particular appeal.

The gadget is made mostly of injection-molded plastic components and with the exception of a small filtration screen was designed, molded, and manufactured in Montana.

As his idea formed, Stoner sought information about the hot tub industry from trade magazines, tub users, and Mountain Hot Tub, a retail hot tub company in Bozeman. Along the way, he discovered that competing products existed. But he did not get discouraged and give up. Rather, he learned about their weak points and design flaws and made his product better.

He received help with manufacturing issues from Montana Manufacturing Extension Center (MMEC) a manufacturing and technical assistance center with five locations statewide, including the Montana State University-Bozeman College of Engineering. MMEC also put him in touch with plastic specialists at the Plastic Technology Deployment Center at Penn State, Erie.

Stoner first designed a rough model using a chunk of radiator hose and parts garnered from the hardware store, crafting small check valves himself to test design potential. After learning more about plastics, he built models incorporating the kinds of plastic that would increase functionality, and the seeds of SWS Corporation and the Grit-Gitter in Gallatin Gateway were sown.

With a tentative model in hand, he approached Brad Wright, of Salient Technologies, Inc. in Bozeman, for help on final product development and stylization. Wright provided the detailed design for manufacturing using computerized solid modeling. He fed dimension specifications for all the parts into a computer using the program "SolidWorks," and then worked out fit and form flaws in the virtual three-dimensional world.

From this process, the final specifications were made for making the part molds. According to Wright, today's increasingly powerful computers and sophisticated programs make this high-tech approach possible. And virtual prototyping saves manufacturers a lot of money over earlier methods by eliminating design flaws before expensive molds are made, molds that can cost thousands of dollars.

The Grit-Gitter uses five molds. A Kalispell company, Steel Reality, made the molds. And Quake Industries in Belgrade manufactured the parts from those molds. Bill Schell, a University Technical Assistance Program engineer who is working on a masters degree at MSU, wrote up an assembly procedure for SWS, and the product is packaged and shipped from the company headquarters in the rural southwest Montana community.

Everything about the product, is solidly couched in Montana, according to Stoner.