BY JANET MANDELSTAM Thirteen years elapsed between the day Jim Walls built his prototype Cobra Tire Tool and the day the tool hit the market. It’s not that Walls was distracted or lost interest in the little tool that makes it easy to fix a flat on a bicycle. “I just couldn’t believe that it wasn’t already out there,” he says. But when years of exhaustive international searches came up empty, Walls says he knew he “had to pursue” mass production of the Cobra. He found a ready audience in cycling-mad Bloomington. The Cobra debuted at the 2010 Hilly Hundred, where riders snapped up more than 250 of the three-inch tools. In its first year, Walls sold more than 1,000 to [...]

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