KIng of Hammers 2025

We won't sugar coat it, KOH 2024 was not that great for us vendors. There was a drastic decrease in foot traffic over the previous year and it made us wonder if 2025 would be a repeat. Much to our surprise, 2025 was the best we have ever seen.

This marked our 8th year as a vendor and it is always an event that we look forward to attending. We heard stories of lines over an hour long at the entrance gate and the endless sea of RVs and vehicles that surrounded Hammertown was quite the sight to see. 

We were in the same location as we have been for the last 5-6 years which is arguably the best in Hammertown. We face the finish line stage and big screens, putting us in the heart of all of the action. This is important to us for more than marketing purposes.

We are a very small team and we have more family and friends that volunteer their time than we have employees so being in the heart of the action is important to us so that it is fun for them. Trust us when we say it takes a special kind of person to voluntarily spend 10+ days in the desert.
We have an amazing team and we can’t thank them enough. 

Again this year we offered free maintenance and repairs on site. We ended up working on about 50 jacks over the 10 days and did everything from fluid changes to pump repairs. We got to meet so many customers with jacks that were 10 plus years old and many had driven across the country to attend and or race in one of the many races over the two-week span. They shared stories on how our jacks save their butts on many occasions and were appreciative that we got them back to an almost new condition before their race and their journey back home. 

Last year we announced our relationship with BFGoodrich Tires and this year the tires were available for purchase either separately or on the new jacks. We brought more of the new tires than we thought we would sell and sold out before the last day. We are very excited about the success of the new tire and we have no doubt that people will continue to be excited for years to come.

In 2017 Dave Cole, the creator of KOH asked us to organize a pit competition and hold it in front of our booth. While it was a crowd and racer favorite event it became increasingly difficult to get race teams to sign up because of the increasing amount of events that the racers had to participate in. In the beginning there was one race. Now there are 9-10 different races in addition to pre-running and qualifying. Many teams didn’t want to risk damaging their vehicles or crew members the night before their race. After talking to our friends at Polaris about this they said “what if we supply the vehicles and that would allow more racers to participate?” We loved the idea and in 2024 we created the Pit Stop Challenge along with our friends at Buggy Whip. We built two identical Polaris RZR Pro R machines for the teams to utilize and it was a huge hit. This year we built two, 2025 Polaris RZR Pro R 4-seat. Dave also gave us the opportunity to move the competition to Saturday night from its traditional Tuesday night time slot. While we were very excited for this opportunity it actually worked against us a little since many of the race teams were racing or pre-running that day. The competition still went off as a huge success as we had many brand ambassadors from our industry competing in addition to upper management from major brands and even some Rebelle Rally athletes. 

To cap off the competition Rugged Radios hold their own competition within the competition. We line up two teams of two. One person is blindfolded and wears a Rugged Radios headset. Their partner then guides them via a Rugged handheld radio and tells them what to do. They have to do all of the same things as the normal competition. They have to walk a 5 gallon fuel pail down to a dump station and dump the Fuel Factory race gas. Then they jack up the UTV and remove the front 35” BFG tire and replace it with a new one. Lower the jack back down and return to the finish. It is hard enough to do these things WITHOUT being blind but it is so much fun to watch people give it their all. One team was led by Billy Slade, who must practice this on a daily basis because he has been the man to beat at nearly every event in 2024. The other was led by Tara McGovern, marketing director for Front Runner and the Dometic brands. Billy was able to beat Tara and her partner so I decided to call him out! I challenged him to battle ME head to head in the blind fold challenge and asked Tara to be my eyes. Well in true Billy Slade fashion, he beat me! In my defense….. actually I have no defence, he is just fast! 

Overall KOH 2025 was a HUGE success! We saw more jacks in use in the pits and around Hammertown than ever before. It has become evident that when people are really venturing out into places where the nearest city is well over an hour away and the closest cheap tool store is 2+ hours away, having a product that will last and stand the abuse that KOH throws at it is essential . Quality products will always be the best choice.