About Us

As with all inventions, the Rapspan range of tools started out as a need to solve a practical problem that was causing a significant amount of loss time on a job Andax Petts, a water drilling contractor for 50 years in Mackay Queensland was experiencing. During his time as a driller, Andax witnessed many injuries as a result of trying to break out drill bits & rods.

Being an inventive sort of a fellow Andax decided to design a breakout tool that would be inherently safe as well as efficient and the Rapspan R Series Spanner was born. The R series tools are patented world wide. As with all good inventions the tool is simple yet satisfies the needs of safety and capacity. The tools have been tested to destruction and although they make a hell of a noise when they fail, the energy is dissipated through the pin joints and they fall to the ground.

It was decided that the tool needed to be drop forged to reduce its production costs and increase its strength. At this point Ian Patterson became involved as a working Director & General Manager. Ian’s Background is design and he has been running his own business for 35 years catering to the heavy industry mining area. With his input we were able to move the company forward and complete the design documentation to a standard where we could manufacture overseas as the cost to manufacture within Australia was just becoming too high. We do however have some of the specialised parts manufactured in Australia like the springs and some bolts. After much research and legwork we established a close working relationship with a small manufacturer in Asia which continues to this day. We make regular visits to discuss new innovations and improvement that may have appeared in the market place.

Andax had always had a pet project and this was called the Unitool. This design is also patented world wide and has been in development for some time. It is a complex tool with in excess of 10 moving parts and has taken some time and several prototypes to end up with a satisfactory working design.

The first of the range, the Rap 5, was released in June 2014 and is slowly becoming a must have tool in your tool bag. The Rap 5 (0.8kg grips 10mm to 50mm) being the smallest in the range, limited our design options because we needed the strength. Our next tool the Rap 13, although following the patented design, allowed us to explore other solutions without compromising the strength. The Rap 13 (4.2kg grips 30mm to 130mm) is in prototype mode and should be released to the market in 2015.

Additional to the Directors, Andax & Ian, we have 4 other board members who are working or have worked within the drilling industry both down hole & horizontal. They are kept in the loop and have input along the design process as well as field testing our prototypes.

Several other designs for fencing pliers and wire and bolt cutters are our future tasks. We are also going to develop a hydraulic version of the Unitool to cater for those applications where the R series wrap around spanner will not fit. All Testing and certification of our tools is carried out in Australia.

Your first port of call when contacting Rapspan will be Robyn who is more than familiar with all of the Rapspan range and generally has her finger on the pulse with the accounts and records. Should your query be of a technical nature you will be referred on to Ian for additional details.

More information regarding our tools is listed across the top of this page.