Retired Pennsylvania Machinist Develops $39 Brass Attachment That Turns Any Garden Hose Into a Pressure Washer — Manufacturer Can’t Keep Up With Demand

By Thomas Brennan | Home & Garden | May 21, 2026

If you have an old pressure washer collecting dust somewhere in your garage, basement, or shed for half the year — keep reading.

Because what a retired American machinist from a small town outside Pittsburgh quietly put on the market last year has been creating an unusual amount of buzz in homeowner forums and Facebook gardening groups across the country.

It’s a small attachment made from solid brass. No motor. No power cord. No pump. You just screw it onto your garden hose — and the hose suddenly cleans as well as a name-brand pressure washer costing $300 or $400.

Sounds like marketing fluff? That’s what we thought too. Until we sat down with the man behind it.

Why pressure washers are the most overrated tool in the American garage

Almost every homeowner knows the routine: Come spring, the patio is covered in moss, the driveway is black with mildew, the siding is streaked with algae. So you go out and buy a pressure washer. For $250, $350, sometimes $600.

What nobody tells you:

And here’s the kicker: in independent comparison tests, most pressure washers land squarely in the middle of the pack. They’re not as powerful as people think — and they don’t clean any better than a strong water jet that’s physically focused the right way.

That’s exactly where the man we’re about to introduce comes in.

An old lathe, a piece of brass — and 18 months of stubborn shop work

His name is Dave Walker, 58, a retired tool-and-die machinist and metalworker from a small town outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. For over 30 years he turned out precision brass parts in his workshop — mostly contract work for local manufacturers. Custom-threaded fittings, valves, one-off jobs nobody else could machine economically.

Visit Dave today in his shop and you’ll meet a man who’d rather work than talk. On the bench: brass blanks, sketches on graph paper, a set of calipers, an old lathe he’s been running since the ‘80s.

The idea for Jetterix came to him almost three years ago — on a Saturday morning, when his wife Linda was wrestling the heavy pressure washer out of the basement and threw her back out doing it.

„She asked me if I couldn’t just build her something smaller. Something you could screw straight onto the garden hose. I laughed and told her, ‘Linda, that’s physically impossible.’ Three weeks later I started running the numbers. And realized: actually, it’s not impossible. Nobody had just done it properly yet.“
— Dave Walker, inventor

Dave pulled out his old fluid-mechanics textbooks, tore his wife’s pressure washer down to the last bolt, and started machining prototypes on his old lathe. Then a second. Then an eighth. After 18 months and 47 prototypes, he had what he now calls the Jetterix compression chamber — a precision-milled brass nozzle that runs on plain water pressure. No motor, no electricity, no pump.

The physics: how a $39 attachment puts out more pressure than a $400 machine

The principle is called the Venturi effect — an 18th-century discovery every engineer knows, but almost no garden-tool maker actually implements correctly.

When water flows through a narrowing pipe, it accelerates. Same as when you put your thumb over the end of a garden hose — the stream suddenly shoots a lot farther.

Dave built that effect into three sequential chambers, each one machined more precisely than the last:

1. Low-pressure intake (40–60 PSI) — that’s what comes out of your hose.
2. Precision venturi throat — milled to 0.005 inch tolerance. This is where the water accelerates to nearly 175 mph.
3. High-pressure output (up to 3,000 PSI) — that’s more than most $400 pressure washers put out.

Here’s the trick: where the cheap plastic nozzles from the big-box hardware store crack after three weeks, the solid brass handles that pressure indefinitely. And because there’s no pump, no motor, and no electricity involved, there’s nothing that can break.

What buyers say after a few weeks of using it

★★★★★ „I was skeptical at first — my husband too. We had a $280 pressure washer sitting in the basement. Our son gave us the Jetterix for Easter. We did the whole patio, the driveway, and the two storage sheds in one afternoon. No power cord, no hauling the heavy machine up the stairs. My husband finally sold the old one last month.“ — Linda M., 64, Cleveland, OH

★★★★★ „I run a small property-maintenance business and bought three Jetterix — one for each truck. Saves me 10 minutes of setup per job. My commercial pressure washer only comes out for really hard jobs anymore. Turns out that almost never happens.“ — Mike S., 51, maintenance contractor, Tampa, FL

★★★★★ „I have arthritis in my hands and haven’t been able to hold a heavy pressure washer in years. The Jetterix weighs almost nothing. My daughter screwed it on for me — took 30 seconds. Yesterday I cleaned my walkway myself for the first time in years. I felt like a kid again.“ — Margaret F., 71, retiree, Phoenix, AZ

Common questions — what we asked the manufacturer

Try it for 30 days — with no one asking you any questions

Dave puts it plainly: „If somebody can’t make it work for them, they get their money back. End of story. I sell American craftsmanship, not cheap plastic junk. I stand behind it.“

The inventor himself: „We can’t keep up with the demand“

„Honestly, I wasn’t expecting this. We manufacture out of a small shop in western Pennsylvania — the brass is cast in the US, every nozzle is machined and calibrated individually. We’re running three shifts right now and still can’t keep up. Last week we had to take the online store offline for two days because we couldn’t ship fast enough. If you want one — order now, not next month.“

Dave Walker Inventor & Founder, Jetterix LLC

What other buyers are saying online