Category: Feasible inventions

Motorcyclists spend too long thinking about their image, sometimes at the expense of their safety.

One example is that bikers with unused portions of their tyre wall feel bad that they don’t corner hard enough to wear down these ‘Chicken Strips’.

Today’s invention eradicates the dangerous temptation to lean too far into corners. It is in the form of a device at the tyre factory. This would undertake a final process in manufacture, during which the available tyre surface would be lightly abraded and re-textured so as to make it all look a little used.

This would be easy for the factory to do in a highly controlled way, slightly reducing tyre life but correspondingly extending rider life.

Sometimes when driving or riding a motorcycle, you can see someone about to step off the pavement in front of you. Usually, they will be wearing headphones.

Sounding your horn may cause them to stop, but it is usually too weak and diffuse a sound -especially in an urban environment.

Today’s invention is a directable loudspeaker which a driver or rider can use to actively point at a particular person or group of people. This could be targeted also at an individual car, for example.

Another variant might be to redirect some of the exhaust noise or to add a loud, recorded verbal warning so as to augment the intensified horn blast.

People who try to filter their motorcycles in between traffic get very good at judging the gaps they can get through.

When they add panniers to their machine, mistakes can easily be made.

Today’s invention is a pair of lights, possibly low-power lasers, mounted on one’s panniers so that they reflect off cars ahead.

If no spots of light are seen by the rider, he/she knows his whole machine can fit through with no risk to wing mirrors/ side panels.

Sometimes it’s the small things that drive you crazy for ages, without your really noticing.

One of these is that many pens have a cap which can be placed on the pen’s barrel-end so that the clip presses into your hand.

Today’s invention is a pen with a key (blue) moulded into its surface corresponding to a slot in the pen’s cap (red).

This ensures that the clip will always be attached in the correct orientation -ie without colliding with one’s hand.

A better design would involve a cam-shaped slot, so that just pushing the pen top on would cause it to rotate into the right position.

Today’s invention offers a way to waste less water during toilet flushing.

A load cell in the seat monitors the weight of material deposited in the toilet bowl as a function of time (by the decrease in weight on the seat).

Urination would be detected by a longer duration unloading (and ignored by this mechanism), whereas defecation would be signalled by more intermittent unloadings (you get the picture).

This allows the system to determine whether an intense flush is required (characterised by a single, large unloading event) or if the usual, small flow will suffice.

It seems that surfers, when they find themselves carried out to sea, are in much more danger from dehydration than sharks.

Today’s invention is therefore a surfboard with a built-in recess which would accommodate a plastic bowl and a portable desalination pump.

A surfer who drifted away from shore could therefore make enough drinking water to stay alive for a much longer time. I’d recommend some energy bars, some uv protection and a few shark repellent tablets as well.

Dings and dents on the side of a car most often come from people behaving carelessly with shopping trolleys or flinging their doors open wide when the parking spaces are just too cramped.

Today’s invention attempts to help with the first of these issues.

Supermarkets would provide each visiting car owner with a foam liner box for the inside of their shopping trolley (red). Shoppers could be convinced to use these because a) the foam keeps any cold products cold whilst they browse and b) the box has handles which make transferring their shopping to their car easier. These would be reusable.

The real purpose though is car door protection.

Putting things in the box requires a user to fold out three foam curtains (yellow) which are attached to the front and side edges of the top of the box. These flop over the trolley sides and form a continuous barrier between the trolley’s metal parts and a parked car’s paintwork.

When the foam boxes are in transit home, the trolleys can be nested, as usual.

A search for replacement dishwasher spray arms reveals that none of them have what I need to be incorporated.

Whatever other filters exist within these systems, oat flakes from breakfast cereal bowls manage to get into the spray arms, clog the jets and leave all the dishes unwashed.

Today’s invention is a simple fix: a small mesh filter at the inlet to both spray arms (I made mine from an old stocking…it doesn’t impair the water flow but makes it so much easier to remove errant flakes than having to poke wires through the spray arm jets).