Built by a former firefighter and first responder
The tool you need is the one still on you.
The irons man sets the axe down to help pull someone out. The fire turns. Now the axe is buried, kicked aside, gone in the smoke — and the job isn't done. GIGAX clips to your gear and stays there through the whole call, so the tool you need is still on you when things go wrong. It has been built and tested in-house. But before it ever earns a place on a rig, we want it beat on in training — real reps, on your ground, not ours.
For truck-company firefighters and instructors. A few minutes. No pitch.
Concept rendering. Final product design subject to change.
The part most new brands skip
Your company already runs tools it trusts. Here's where this one sits.
The irons on your rig earned their place over decades. A new tool doesn't get that place by asking for it — it earns it, or it ends up on a garage wall. Right now GIGAX is unproven, and we're not going to pretend otherwise.
It collapses to twelve inches and rides on your turnouts, hands free. Open it and you get a full thirty-six inches of reach — then it collapses back down and stays on you through the call, instead of getting left in the rubble.
The only honest move is to hand it to people who know and listen to what comes back, so we build one of the most trusted tools on the rig.
- 12 → 36 inches
- Hands-free carry
- ~8 LBS
Invented by
Joe Walker didn't learn this the easy way.
Army Reserve. Ten years in law enforcement. Came out of the fire academy a cross-trained Public Safety Officer — law enforcement, fire, and EMS. Every chapter taught him the same thing: when lives are on the line, your equipment doesn't get a bad day. The first time an axe got set down inside a burning structure — and his team went without it when it mattered — he started picturing something different. GIGAX is the tool he built to fix that — the one he needed and never had.
The question a shop can't answer
It folds. So it has a joint. The joint holds under load in the shop.
That's proven. What isn't proven yet is the only question that actually matters: does it hold under load in the real world — in the smoke, in the wet, in the grip of someone who's been on air for twenty minutes. A tool that folds at the wrong second is worse than no tool at all, and that's exactly why we won't call this settled ourselves.
It has held up through our own in-house testing. It has not yet been put through real training evolutions by the people who'd actually carry it — and that's the one gap we need closed before it goes anywhere near a call.
What we're asking
Push it in training. Tell us the truth.
We're looking for truck-company firefighters and instructors who will run GIGAX through real training evolutions — drills, forcible-entry props, hands-on sessions — and report back exactly what they find. Where it flexes. Where it slips. Whether it's the real thing or a wall hanger. Film it. That's how we see what you see, not an afterthought.
Your read shapes what ships, or whether it ships at all.
Concept rendering. Final product design subject to change.
What you get
Your feedback doesn't just get read. It gets built in.
You get the tool in your hands ahead of anyone outside the First Due Response Team, to run it and try to break it. What you report back gets internalized and built into the tool before it goes anywhere near the public.
Once that work is done, you get the first real one off the line — the actual production GIGAX, marked as First Due, yours. Not a sample. Not a prototype. The one your feedback helped make right.
You're also on record as First Due — the crew that got it before anyone, put it through the wringer, and told the truth about what they found. That's a real thing to have your name on.
Who's behind it
Real names. Look them up.
No anonymous brand, no borrowed logo. The people building this put their names on it.
Inventor
Joe Walker
Former firefighter, first responder. Inventor of GIGAX and holder of its U.S. design patent (No. D1045565).
Engineering
John Stump
Founder of Cliq, the collapsible chair that holds a grown adult. Collapsible gear built to bear load is the whole problem here.
cliqproducts.comRetail
Kevin Kaiser
Founder of Grand Trunk. Two decades putting real-world outdoor gear in people's hands.
grandtrunk.com
First Due Response Team
This earns a place on your rig, or it doesn't. You're the one who knows.
Applications are open. Spots are limited — this is an application, not a signup, and if you make the cut, we're going to ask more of you than your email.
A few minutes to apply.