Loch Ness has Nessie, Sesame Street has the Cookie Monster and now the construction industry has a monster of its very own—the Gyp Monster.
Necessity being the mother of invention, it was inevitable that someone somewhere would invent a device that would help solve the problem of on-site gypsum board waste. That someone took the form of a retired contractor from Minnesota.
In the early ’80s, he assembled a Rube Goldberg-like contraption made of 16-Penny nails, a cedar post and a small motor. Thus was born the idea for a gypsum-grinding machine. Though crude, it followed the time-honored axiom of architecture, “form follows function.” When the motor rotated the nail-studded cedar post, the scrap gypsum board fed into it was readily torn asunder.