BANGOR – If necessity is the mother of invention, Claude Morin must at least be a distant cousin.

Since the time he was old enough to pick up a wrench, the 55-year-old metal fabricator and welder has been tinkering, fixing and constructing machines and gadgets ranging from garden equipment to agricultural harvesters.

“When I look at something or watch people work, I’m always thinking: ‘How can I make that better?'” Morin said. “I hate it when stuff is complicated; I want to know how I can turn it into something simple.”

About five years ago Morin’s attention and creativity was captured by a simple process every vehicle owner faces at one time or another – the oil change.

Whether it involves the family car, a city bus or tractor-trailer truck, changing oil is a messy, time-consuming job that can leave a mechanic’s or do-it-yourselfer’s hands scalded from hot oil or numbed from fumbling around with cold metal tools during a Maine winter.

Not to mention the difficulties associated with catching, storing and disposing of the waste oil.

“The environment has always been special to me,” Morin said. “I wanted to try to improve what we were doing so it would be better for the environment, cleaner and easier for us.”

And so was born the concept and design behind Spill Free Oil Drainage Products, LLC. The device Morin created is so simple and practical, it begs the question: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Spill Free is an oil extracting system that allows mechanics to remove oil from vehicles without ever exposing a drop or touching a wrench.

The system works through a special valve and flange that is easily installed and simply replaces the current oil pan plug on vehicles. A special adapter – the Morico Quick Connector – attaches with a simple twist of the wrist to a pump that extracts the oil and deposits it directly into a waste-oil storage container. The system can work with a simple hand pump or a more elaborate electric pump.

The Morico flange and Morico Quick Connector are patented and trademarked.

The entire oil-removal process can be reduced to minutes, Morin said.

“With this system you can remove eight gallons of oil in two and a half minutes if the oil is at 100 degrees,” he said.

But for this farmer-turned-entrepreneur, it is what the system can do for the environment that really counts.

Because the system is completely closed, the oil goes directly into a storage tank without a drop of oil being spilled.

“Mechanics and the environment are both spared the risk of oil contamination,” he said.

Inventing seems to be in Morin’s blood. From his earliest days on his father’s potato farm in Fort Kent, he recalls taking things apart and building something new from the parts.

“Our wheelbarrows were always without wheels because I had made myself some contraption and used those wheels,” Claude Morin said. “My father always said to ‘hide the wrenches around Claude.'”

Once, Morin even built – from scratch – a broccoli harvester based solely on a photograph he cut out of a magazine.

“I looked at a snapshot and was able to figure out the size of the tires,” he said. “I got the [parts] number off of the rim and that gave it away.”

From those few measurements, he based the entire design of the harvester.

“It fit perfectly on the tractor the first time,” he said.

Morin and his wife Priscilla, who co-owns Spill Free, managed the family farm in the St. John Valley for about 20 years. But about 14 years ago, economic circumstances conspired against them, prompting the couple and their four children to move to the Bangor area for job opportunities.

Claude Morin still works as a welder and fabricator for H.O. Bouchard Inc. and Priscilla Morin now works as a research technician at Eastern Maine Medical Center.

Despite the move, Claude Morin continued to putter with his inventive ideas.

He built the prototype of the Spill Free system using his own metal lathe in the garage at his home in Hermon in 1996 and patented the device in 1998. The couple enlisted the help of Eastern Maine Development Corp. and the Maine Manufacturing Extension Partnership to help develop and market the Spill Free system. Last year, the Morins and their device were recognized with an environmental technology seed grant award from the Maine Technology Institute.

The system is currently a featured environmentally friendly product on the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s Web site and here in Maine, the state Department of Environmental Protection, while not endorsing the product by name, certainly lauds the concept.

“We are for anything that reduces the impact on the environment,” Julie Churchill, DEP assistant director of the office of innovation and assistance, said. “Reducing point source pollution is a number one priority.”

For the last year, the couple has been attending trade shows and hitting the road to sell the product. While the system can work on any vehicle, the couple is marketing the product to commercial and municipal operations where it is more economically feasible.

The valve and flange cost $120. The Morico Quick Connector, which can be attached to any pump, sells for $160.

With time and effort saved on oil changes and cleanup, an average company with about 10 vehicles can recover the cost of the system in 6 months, estimates Morin.

The first to purchase the system was Timberland Trucking in Medway.

“Claude drove up here with an old oil tank and the system on the back of his truck to demonstrate it for us,” Clayton McKissick, Timberland head mechanic, said. “That pretty much sold us right there.”

Today Timberland has 23 heavy trucks adapted for the Spill Free system.

“It works excellent and saves us a lot of time and mess,” McKissick said. “It would be hard to get along without it now.”

The system is gaining attention around the state.

“This is a great system,” Bob Dawes, equipment director for the city of Bangor said. “It’s environmentally friendly and, more importantly, employee friendly.”

Dawes is responsible for the maintenance and care of the 200 vehicles in the city’s motor pool – from police cruisers to city buses. Currently, three vehicles are equipped for the Spill Free System and there are plans to equip all 200.

“My guys handle a lot of motor oil,” Dawes said. “The less I can make them susceptible to it, the better.”

Some of Dead River Co.’s oil trucks have been equipped with the adapters as have about a half dozen buses of the Cyr Bus fleet.

There are about 250 valves and adapter set-ups on the road throughout Maine at the moment, Priscilla Morin said.

With Spill Free off and running, Claude Morin is already looking ahead to new inventions.

“My head is almost splitting with ideas,” he said. “When I get [Spill Free] really going, I want to go into research and development full time.”

Morin does not view himself as someone special when it comes to his inventions.

“I’m no genius,” Claude Morin is quick to say. “Everybody is good at something. I just have a way of looking at something and making it simple.”

On the Net: www.spillfreellc.com