Our Story

We are a small family business, based in the Snowy Mountains village of Dalgety, on the banks of the iconic Snowy River.

GANT TOOLS, originally established as MTB Trail Tools in 2013, was founded by Rob Gant-Thompson shortly after his tenure as a director and initial business developer at Rolling Ground Jindabyne. The concept for specialised trail building tools emerged in 2010 during Rob's time at Rolling Ground, he observed that commercially available tools for hand-building trails were often inadequate, bending or breaking under use and often only lasting weeks or months of hard use. At the time, no suitable alternatives were available in Australia, with specific trail tools only manufactured and accessible in the USA.

Drawing from his extensive experience in trail design and construction, including having designed and built over 20 kilometres of hand-built trails, Rob developed the first Pro Trail Tool and Big Chipper models. These innovative designs were registered with IP Australia and incorporated specific angles and shapes that simplified the building process and facilitated the implementation of IMBA (International Mountain Bike Association) trail building principles. The Pro Trail Tool and Big Chipper models allowed users to quickly check trail alignment angles, outslope, gradient, and backslope without additional equipment. 

Initially based on the size and weight of the commonly available McLeod tool used by trail builders and firefighters, Rob evolved his tools through extensive testing and user feedback into smaller and lighter versions, while maintaining the same shapes, angles, and quality construction as the original models, yet proving more popular due to reduced user fatigue during all-day use. This product development process further expanded to include even lighter models suitable for smaller adults and children, while still maintaining high performance for demanding use. The small batch production process has allowed us to take customer feedback through design processes and produce tools that meet the demands of our customers, making one off prototypes to test customer ideas and seeking feedback, before adding design features to production models.

During this period, Rob worked in a variety of rolls for the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) with experience in trail maintenance teams, large trail projects, road repair and construction tasks and revegetation works in alpine and sub alpine environments and bush fire duties, which highlighted the need for high-performing, lightweight, tough, and durable tools that could out last current options.

Rob developed several prototype fire tools, refining them through feedback with experienced NPWS staff to create two unique models with key features for remote firefighting services, as well as working with Australia's leading alpine ecologist and regeneration specialist to create new tools that make revegetation works more efficient. These innovations expanded Gant Tools' product range beyond trail building equipment.

Over the years, we've sold tools to various organisations, including volunteer trail groups, landscaping companies, mountain bike clubs, councils, NPWS maintenance and fire teams, MTB parks, trail builders and individuals across Australia's East Coast, with lots of great customer feedback and ideas, we continue to test new concepts and improve on our processes to make our tools the best we can.

With GANT TOOLS transitioning from a side project to Rob's full-time focus, the business is poised for expansion. Current plans include increasing production numbers and broadening the product range to serve the landscaping and gardening markets, with several new models in development and testing for production. We are hoping that with these new products and full time dedication to the business, our tool range and production can progress to meet the increasing interest and demands of our customers.  

From our little shed to you, we put a lot of effort into the design and manufacturing of our tools and hope you find them the best tools you can get. We think they are.