The story of the D’s Knees Knee Caps starts with my own struggle with sore knees I had just started a new job, and a few months after I started this job, my left knee started feeling sore.
My new job was what you might call “fast paced”, and it required that I did a lot of kneeling and walking. I had to kneel frequently to access equipment, as well as climbing in and out of underground sumps. The job was environmental testing of underground storage tanks, which means I was testing gas stations.
When I started to feel discomfort from kneeling, it made sense. This job was always going to be hard on the knees! I could have quit the job, but like everyone else, I needed the job and I didn’t have any other good job prospects at the time.
I couldn’t quit, so I did the next best thing. I bought knee pads. I was on the road at the time and I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. I had a good pair of knee pads at home, I thought. So I bought a cheap pair of knee pads from Home Depot. They were almost useless! They were so cheap that it really wasn’t a surprise.
When I got home I pulled out my old flooring knee pads–they are the Pro Knees, arguably the world’s most expensive knee pads. They cover your entire shin with a thick foam pad. They are big, bulky, and heavy. But they had worked really well for me at a previous job installing hardwood flooring, so I tried them at my new job. I was expecting them to be comfortable, so I was surprised when my left knee was still sore when I used them! I tried to use them just as kneeling pads, just kneeling on them without strapping them to my legs, but my knee was still sore!
After my big knee pads failed, I experimented with a few other knee pads. I was surprised to find a pair of Bucket Boss knee pads that was pretty good at first. I mean, they felt great the first time I tried them, but 3 weeks later my knee was just as sore is it was in the beginning.
I found myself in an awkward position. “Good” knee pads weren’t working! What I should do? It was obvious to me that most knee pads are just a foam pad, so all of the different knee pads are fundamentally the same! So I searched for knee pads that were different. I was very persistent in searching, but I came up with very few knee pads that promised to work better than the ones I tried.
The one knee pad that stood out in my searching was the Arctery’x Leaf Knee Cap. It looked different, but they didn’t explain why it would work where other designs had failed. I was already familiar with the brand–it is the expensive brand that sometimes sells last year’s color at deep discounts! I didn’t really believe they would be any different, but I kept on coming back to their knee caps. After several weeks I broke down and I bought a pair. If they worked, it would be worth it.
The Arctery’x Leaf Knee Caps are no longer sold to the general public due to being “tactical” product, but at the time I could buy them for a cool $89! It ended up being a good thing, because they helped gave me the belief that a knee pad could be made that would help me, and that design gave me an idea of how to do it!
I don’t know if it was by design, but if I wore them so the plastic cap was directly over the front of your knee, the cap protected the front of my knee from any contact or pressure. My knee balanced on top of this cap. These knee caps felt pretty tippy and unstable due to their round shape, but I accepted it because my knees felt better. I thought I had found the solution!
I was happy for a couple months, but then my knee started getting sore again! What happened? It took another couple of weeks to figue out why. The plastic cap in the knee pads had cracked! The crack wasn’t obvious because of the glued construction, but the crack allowed the cap to collapse, flattening out when I kneeled on it, cancelling out the benefit I got from them.
So I bought another pair, and I wore them for around 3 months, until the same thing happened! It was like clockwork. I ended up buying 3 pairs, and I also got a warranty on one pair.
By the time I had burned through the third pair, I was forced to realize they are not cut out for the work I was doing. They are a clever design, but most importantly for me, they lacked durability!
I had already concluded that there were no other knee pads available that would actually help me, so I decided to make my own. I had build cedar strip canoes before, so how hard could it be to make a knee pad?
I started the design with the idea of composite materials like fiberglass and kevlar to make a more durable cap. If a thin plastic cap fails by splitting, I could fix it by adding reinforcing fibers that resist splitting! And as the idea developed, I realized that I could fix some of the other problems with the Arctery’x design at the same time! Because I was using composites, I could make the knee caps any shape I want! The Arctery’x design needed to have a dome shaped cap to maximize strength while minimizing weight, but I realized that composites like carbon fiber allow me to make any shape I wanted, making a stronger design without adding much weight!
At that point the design was far from figured out! I knew I needed a rigid cap to support the knee, and I needed a shape that elevates the knee when kneeling. I wanted to make it durable enough to last me years in an environment that destroys lesser knee pads in weeks or months. I want it to still weigh less than other knee pads. I wanted it to be stable when kneeling.
What you see here is the result of over 5 years of continuous experimenting and testing. In the beginning I would build knee pads on the weekend, then tested them at work during the week. At the end of the week I would rush out to my garage, making modifications to my molds, racing the clock to make a new pair to wear the following week.
It took around 6 months of trial and error to understand the design and to make a working prototype that was good enough for me. I could have stopped there.
But when I had a knee pad design that allowed me to kneel pain free, I was excited about it. My prototype was a little crude, and my coworkers were not terribly impressed. But this design had solved a major problem in my life, and I was convinced it could help other people facing a similar problem. So I decided to continue to develop and refine the design into a professional product. So I spent years fine tuning the design, field testing many iterations of the design, while teaching myself new processes and techniques to make them better.
Making these knee caps a reality was far more complicated than I first thought, but I persevered because I believed they can help people. So whether you are needing manage a knee injury, extend your career, or just maintain hobbies and activities that involve kneeling, I believe D’s Knees can help you. They have made my career possible, and I am hoping they can do the same for you.
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