About five years ago, Dave Jones Inc., a plumbing company in Madison, Wisconsin, bought its first Sidekick pipe-threading machine, manufactured by Wheeler-Rex. These days the company owns nearly three-dozen of the devices.“All our guys who do gas piping have a Sidekick threader on their service van,” says Alan Strong, a master plumber who’s currently the quality assurance manager at Dave Jones, which primarily does service work and installations throughout southern Wisconsin. “It’s a very compact, efficient and well-designed little machine.”Now called the Sidekick II, the unit’s size — it weighs 58 pounds and measures roughly 1 foot square (15 by
