His next inventions came about as the result of a summer project. He'd taken on the task of renovating his parents' home, to make it a healthier environment for his father, who suffers from allergies. Doing renovation work is a dirty, dusty business, and exposes workers to many toxins. But the commercially available units all came with cumbersome rubber hoses that dragged on the floor and were impossible to use for some renovation work, such as floor refinishing. So Kane hit on the idea of making an extremely lightweight, collapsible plastic hose that stays above the head at all times, attached to a rotary bearing at the top of the hood unit, so that the hose never wraps around, no matter how many times the wearer turns.
Industrial bellows are tubes made of folded or pleated plastic or other material.
They may be used to conduct air from one place to another, as in the hose of Kane's air-supply mask, or to protect sensitive machine parts from dust. These bellows designs resulted in heavy, expensive tubes whose form became distorted as they stretched over limited distances, with a maximum extension of about twenty-five percent. He then developed equations and mathematical tables that can be used to design bellows to fit specific applications, such as pumps, expandable shelters, collapsible containers, and protective tubes for sensitive machine parts. Recently he custom-designed a bellows for the Weldon Machine Tool company in California. Kane's thesis at MIT concerns hydrostatic bearings.