Florsheim Koola	Megagrip Koola

Overview

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Florsheim Koola
(#840)

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Technical Details

I acquired my Florsheim Koola from Florsheim Consultants in 2006.

The Florsheim Koola is a round tuber. It is turned from aluminum alloy and then hard anodized. It has a stiff, 3 mm. stainless steel keeper. My Florsheim Koola is 57 mm. long, 74 mm. wide, 96 mm. high, and weighs 85 g.

There are no markings on my Florsheim Koola.

Comments

The Koola is larger than the Lowe Tubers, and sports a rigid, pivoting, stainless steel keeper. The Florsheim model differs from the Megagrip Koola by being anodized and having slightly different keeper dimensions.

I bought this Koola new on eBay from Florsheim Consultants in late 2007. The instructions indicated that Florsheim Consultants made the Koola. There was no mention of Megagrip or what had happened in the years since 1988, the (incorrect) date that I had been given for the Megagrip Koola. I sent an email to Mike Nield of Florsheim, asking what the story was. I received the following reply (dated Monday, January 08, 2007 ) the next day:

Hi Gary,

This is an interesting twist to the story.

About 6 - 7 years ago myself (Mike Nield) and Nadim Siddiqui of Megagrip developed the Koola Belay device. My company (Engineering) made samples originally and then as our enthusiasm increased I decided to produce about 1000 to see how production would run.

Because the market at the time was cluttered with belay devices, it seemed to prove quite difficult to break into the market. I tried to make them more appealing by having them colour anodised in 4 different colours.

Over the years our enthusiasm went cold and I have about 500 here in various stages of production sitting upstairs in my store room, so I asked Nadim if it was OK for me to try to re-coup some of my costs by selling them on Ebay.

Regards Mike

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Megagrip Koola
(#787)

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Technical Details

I acquired my Megagrip Koola from Ian MacNab in 2003.

The Megagrip Koola is a round tuber. It is turned from aluminum alloy. It has a stiff, 3 mm. stainless steel keeper. My Megagrip Koola is 55 mm. long, 68 mm. wide, 108 mm. high, and weighs 76 g.

There are no markings on my Megagrip Koola.

Comments

In an email, Ian told me that he got it from Megagrip around 1988, but I believe that he meant to type 1998. Aside from a slightly longer keeper and not being anodized, it is identical to the Florsheim Koola.

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