Instead of greasing wheel bearings by hand, which is messy and time-consuming, Noel Dawson’s Roller Packa allows mechanics to press them into a plastic funnel that pushes the grease from a cartridge up through the bearing.

Because the bearing is pushed into the device with a plastic plug, there is no need to touch the greased bearing during the process.

The design began to form in Mr Dawson’s mind some years ago when he took on the maintenance of Ulan Coal Mine’s light vehicles.

The bearings had to be cleaned and removed as often as fortnightly, a messy and laborious process.

He said some greases contained heavy metals that could be detrimental to skin, which he suspected could be considered as dangerous as asbestos in the future.

“Doing it all the time, I realised there had to be a better way,” he said.

He began by constructing a wooden prototype, eventually moving on to metal, patenting the product, and selling an early version through a larger company.

Now Mr Dawson has made a few revisions and is ready to sell the perfected product himself.

“There’s not one thing about it that I’d change,” he said of the current device.

The plastic components are manufactured by Sydage on Industrial Avenue, and Furney’s handles the metal elements and assemblage.

Mr Dawson took four weeks off after Christmas to sell his product along the east coast, starting near Narooma and working north to Port Macquarie.

He said 70 per cent of mechanics took up the product, and many told him it had been a long time coming.

“I haven’t had any bad feedback,” he said.

“Old mechanics say, ‘How come you didn’t make this back when I was a young guy?’”

He said apprentices liked it because they didn’t get so dirty, bosses liked it because they went through fewer cleaning rags, and he even sold one to a mechanic’s wife as a gift for her husband.

He has had interest from TAFE colleges and Toyota dealers, and 4000 have just been exported to the USA.

The Mudgee team of Furney’s, Sydage and Dawson are “getting a big rush” from seeing their simple product adopted internationally.

His next plan is to develop a version of the product to handle bearings for heavy vehicles up to light aircraft, which he hopes he can continue to produce from Mudgee