Engineering for the Fun of It

"...have you ever used your years of experience and arsenal of technical skills to develop something of limited marketability..."

Most companies would say (just before closing their doors), "That was not our intent, but it sort of worked out that way."

Sometimes you do build what was intended, but the market analysis fails and it doesn't sell. Better mousetrap. Door. Beaten path. Etc.

Or worse, a better product appears just before product release. This did happen to me.

Dangerous Bill

I build large scale model railroad locomotives. Is it fun? YES. Is it marketable? I have people who want to buy them.

And the other side of the coin is the accidental exposure of an idea and the resulting explosion of popularity. Take Rube Goldberg for example.

oh... that seems like most of what I do... I just finished this one..

there are more on my page here on cr4, and kicking around... but I do keep a few for myself if I think they are going to work out some day. CR4 is very inspiring for me...

chris

Looks like the Powerful Mach 5's little brother. ;-)

I am working on a solar concentrator on equatorial mount. I made a crude prototype over 2 years ago.

It worked but there were various problems. I solved some of them early on and a few remained.

I really expected someone from a 3rd world help organization to take over the idea but it never happened. One problem got solved in the spring so I reactivated it as models. (The models got me places in a science fair, ideawave and the organic islands festival. But still no real interest. Just one guy, David Williams, gave technical input. He also made an easier fork in the project. But nobody made his easier design either! Mr Williams is close to 70 but still prepared to think.

So now, I am on crude prototype Mark II. I was dreading starting to make this because I am not good at it, I have no room for it in my back yard and I have little time available. But now that it is started it is great fun and I am making progress. Really fulfilling! Really surprising!

I KNOW it will work (theoretically) but you have to put quite a bit of thought into each physical step so that the next step can be easy and can be done by me with my abilities. I hope to have it complete before the end of September. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OqG2LesnSo

I am proud of it because there are concepts there that did not exist 3 years ago. For instance, the concept of using a half parabolic dish is herasy to many people. They cannot deal with it! so they simply dismiss it.

People said the dripper trackers (to turn the thing) were rube goldberg devices. But the latest version called liquid piston tracker will probably be part of university of Victoria "mekatronics" course this year. I used to think people could be persuaded by logic but most are not. It seems they line up behind their "Champion" who speaks and thinks for them. And most people (including students) want an experiment with a certain positive result at the end. Thats not how it works. But great fun none the less.

Brian

I have not thought of anything that (I think would be marketable) but I certainly use the engineering skills I have on a daily basis. The most common comment from my wife is "Why do you always have to over engineer things?"...she prefers duct tape and hose clamps to more elegant solutions with little understanding of why it won't work!

Certainly of limited marketability but unquestionably fun to do, was a dagger drop mechanism I designed and built for a local theatre company's production of "Macbeth". You will recall the scene in which the half-mad Macbeth sees a bloody dagger floating in the air before him ("Art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?").

The challenge was to have the dagger suddenly appear in the air, absolutely still, and then just as suddenly disappear from sight.

On cue, a backstage assistant moved a lever to release the dagger, which dropped out of the rafters, suspended fore and aft by two thin black lines (monofilament can catch the light). To cushion the last couple of inches of fall and prevent any tell-tale wobble of the dagger, a valve-adjustable pneumatic cylinder was built using pump parts from a Coleman lantern and incorporated into the mechanism. The movement of the Coleman lantern piston closed a microswitch which turned on a small halogen lamp aimed and focused through a narrow horizontal slit to precisely illuminate the dagger the instant it came to rest.

At the conclusion of Macbeth's speech, the backstage operator pulled a pin, which killed the light, while simultaneously releasing a counterweight which snapped the dagger back up into the rafters and out of sight. The illusion was complete.

This is a perfact example of something that could be patented, but shouldn't be. Outside of recurring productions of Macbeth, I think for most people a dagger drop mechanism is not a "must have" item.

Very cool! Ingenious and totally noncommercial!

Dangerous Bill

When I learned the principle behind the optical sound track on the 16mm movie film in high school, I tried to develop a guitar using this principle but the major limiting factor was the ability to focus a light beam so it could be modulated by a guitar string. That was in the late 60's, look how far the technologies of sound and light have progressed.

I'm fond of this 'modular engine' idea I had for my modular vehicle thread.

Maximum cool!!