HERMISTON – Jim Ruhe has built a better trimmer for professional nail technicians and it’s attracted the attention of a national marketing firm.

Dial-a-Nail, developed and produced by Ruhe Industries of Hermiston, will be distributed nationally by Tweezerman Corp. of New York. He describes it as a beauty-industry-related product that will be used by technicians who apply false fingernails for “accurate and repeatable slicing of nails.”

Tweezerman Corp has a “one-year exclusive on the product,” Ruhe said. “They’re going nationwide with it in January.”

Teri Schiano, Tweezerman’s vice president of product development and director of quality control, confirmed that the company prefers to have exclusive rights to the products it distributes.

“We believe nail professionals will like this product because it will save them time without sacrificing service to their client,” she said.

Ruhe, 37, has been in the building construction trade for 18 years, nine in Hermiston. He established his new company this year after developing Dial-a-Nail with the help of his wife, Teri, a hair stylist and nail technician in Hermiston.

“Ruhe Industries is a new product development company as well as an existing product improvement company,” he said. “We’re a necessity-based business. Our products are products of necessity.”

Although his business is new, Ruhe said he’s been doing product research and development for 10 years. He’s the owner, inventor and producer of these products and is a one-man show for now, but if Dial-a-Nail takes off, he’s hoping to be able to add employees and also to attract some investors.

Ruhe says he a problem-solver who uses “Yankee ingenuity and an outside-of-the-box way of thinking.” He is working on other new products and product improvements, and on agreements with marketing firms now, but says he can’t reveal all of them because of patent rights.

He is talking about three of his other products, however. One is a pair of construction aids called the Tape Mate and the String Mate. Packaged together, one attaches to a tape measure, the other to a string line.

“The Tape Mate and the String Mate are both like having a third arm,” Ruhe said. “It relieves the necessity of having a second person handling the other end of your tape. It allows the end of your tape to be fastened to a particular point.”

Ruhe also is working on a personal karaoke machine that allows people to hear their amplified voice over a vehicle’s stereo system, and on an automatic vehicle jack.

“It relieves the hassle of having to bend over and reach under a vehicle and jack it up,” he said, explaining that the handle attaches securely to the jack, which has a wider base than most vehicle jacks and can be maneuvered easily with the handle.

After the jack is positioned, he said, a quarter turn of the handle brings the jack up to contact position with the vehicle. A second handle position, the “safety position” is used for loosening wheel lug nuts. The third and fourth handle positions raise a tire from the ground, according to Ruhe.

“It’s the one I’d want in my grandmother’s vehicle,” he said.