The Story of Roofus®

Developed on building sites by Sean Pepper, a qualified carpenter in Western Australia, The Roofus® took its shape over 8 years from sketches on ceiling trimmers at ‘smoko’ and bank statement envelopes after work, all the way to the production model sold today. Sean always wanted to make his job easier, more efficient and more precise and wasn’t content using tools from the 1800’s in the 21st century. Traditional hand tools such as roofing squares, combination squares, protractors, sliding T-bevels and speed squares are all useful, but very limited in what they can do. It’s not convenient to have even a few of them in your tool belt, let alone all of them spread cross your job site resulting in lots of walking around to find them. It’s about time someone found the patience to work out of a better solution.

Sean Pepper

Founder and inventor of the Roofus®

Sean began to think of how he could combine the functionality of all the traditional tools into one design when he was 18. The first prototype of the Roofus design was made and tested using plywood shown below. You will see the even earlier prototypes further down.

Repeated over and over again with numerous design improvements and refinements

Sean built and used numerous prototypes as his primary square onsite as he considered it the only way to determine the right design improvements. The faint orange ones did most of the site work, 3D printed from nylon using SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) and were often fitted with hardware from old nail guns and combination squares.

Rufus the dog that inspired the Roofus® name.

‘Roofus’ was named after a dog also called ‘Rufus’ that spent a lot of time on Sean’s building sites – a work colleague’s dog. Sean considered him ‘the comedian dog’ as he usually got you laughing somehow. Rufus was literally any Carpenter’s Best Friend!