Category: Possible inventions

It can be a pain to disassemble complex components to be able to give them a wire brushing on hidden or recessed surfaces.

Today’s invention attempts to allow this to happen effectively with everything left in situ and without having to spray sand or beads everywhere.

A flexible pipe is attached to a high pressure airline.

Air is blown down this, which causes a thistle-like ball of wire (blue) to oscillate in the airflow, restrained by a flexible cable (red).

This device can be pushed into place behind components (grey) so that the oscillations of the ball rub any flakes of dirt or rust etc off the surface.

If you go travelling or camping on a motorcycle, it’s great whilst the weather stays dry.

When it rains, everything has to be packed up and often reused, whilst still sodden.

Today’s invention offers a way to dry one’s tent or spare clothes during the next leg of your journey.

One person in your group would be equipped with panniers (red) which can have their front and rear faces folded in (and with drain holes in the bottom surfaces). This allows airflow during riding to blast through the wet material (green), drying it before the next stop.

This could also be adapted for use on a car’s luggage rack.

The fashion for standing desks has encouraged quite a few people to work standing up. Some of them feel better for the extra exercise this seems to provide.

Today’s invention extends this puritanical regime into leisure time.

Instead of allowing yourself to become a couch potato, in the evening tv watching could only be done when standing up. This would limit the wasted hours in front of soap operas as well as the damaging effects of lying about for hours.

The tv would be positioned near a corner of a room and placed on a pyramidal base, bolted to the floor. The tv would not be free to turn.

Given no means of placing even a stool in front of the screen, viewers would simply stand until they had had enough.

Formula 1 racing always has to be generating some controversy. One recent one centres on driver safety: specifically, how to prevent drivers being hurt by flying debris, whilst maintaining the open-cockpit nature of the sport/business.

Various cages and shields have been suggested.

Today’s invention offers a solution that leaves the cars looking pretty much as they do now (ie not very pretty).

Each car would be fitted with a fringe of carbon fibre strands (the spacing could be varied depending on the level of protection required). These strands could be made strong enough to withstand braking and wind forces, yet so thin that they would be effectively undetectable on a tv image.

Each strand would have a wire loop inside so that if the fibre was broken, an electrical signal would be detectable by an onboard computer dedicated to this task.

Any object flying towards a driver’s helmet would break a strand or two and, within a couple of milliseconds, fire some pyrotechnics which would raise a bulletproof but transparent shield (shown as red) in front of the driver.

Today’s invention combines the use of a vehicle sunroof (red) with its roofrack (green).

When the vehicle is stopped, the sunroof is opened and a pneumatically driven column (grey) extends upwards through it.

This engages with a sheet of stiff aluminium cell board which is then lifted off the sunroof.

The column is also free to turn, as shown, providing a platform or roof with many possible uses (eg instead of umbrellas for people entering a hotel, or for someone fixing the engine in a storm).

A board with the ability to fold down its ends might provide an armoured carapace for vehicles vulnerable to attacks by shopping trolleys. A street trader might use this to hang their wares from.

It seems odd that I haven’t thought this one up before. Odder still that I can’t find it anywhere else.

Imagine a glider which embodies an electric motor with a propeller attached.

In today’s invention, the motor runs the propeller hard enough, in a single burst, to discharge the battery and get the aircraft in the sky (say 100m).

At that point, the engine and propeller unit is jettisoned, whilst the prop continues to spin.

The engine would also have plenty of padding, so that when it autogyros back onto the landing strip, it can be recharged and used in another engineless glider.

Today’s invention is, I believe, a wholly new application for an established technology.

I’m sick of glasses which are held together using some kind of screw. This is supposed to hold the leg to the eyepiece whilst also providing some frictional resistance -so that the legs are angled inwards and the glasses stay on the face. Of course, this usually fails, when the screw starts to disengage.

The technology required to fix this situation is to injection mould the glasses’ eyepiece and both legs as a single unit. Each leg would join the eyepiece using a ‘living hinge’ (as discussed by some experts here).

It’s really a plastic mechanism which snaps between two stable positions…one ‘closed’, so that the leg would be against the frame and the other open at, say, 80 degrees from the frame, so that just enough pressure would be exerted on the head to hold them in place.

Bistables can be made much more robust and fatigue-resistant than the fine bottletop version indicated in the picture.

Consider the high-accuracy bolt-action rifle. It has very few moving parts (the bolt + firing pin and the spring). This makes for a short lock time (the time between trigger squeeze and firing), and thus less chance of being thrown off target and/or malfunctioning.

The problem is that when the bolt drives the firing pin into the firing cap on the bullet, all of that moving mass, restrained only on the underside by the marksman’s hands, has a tendency to force the barrel to point initially downwards a little and the bullet’s accuracy is unnecessarily compromised.

Today’s invention is therefore a reaction-free firing pin mechanism (yellow) (restrained in the middle by a rigid bar (red).

The pin is double sided, so that when the trigger is activated, one side hits the bullet and the other hits the body of the rifle. This maintains stillness -at least until the gunpowder in the bullet ignites.

(From that point, established set up and sighting mechanisms can be used to limit the inaccuracy caused by any large unbalanced torques).

Even when cars become autonomous, there will still be situations where an old-fashioned emergency stop is required.

Today’s invention offers a potentially life-saving extra level of braking for just such an eventuality.

In the top half of the diagram, a vehicle is shown braking. It is equipped with areas of reinforced brake pad material in its wheel arches.

If conventional, sharp braking (including ABS etc) is not going to avert a disaster, then, the second diagram illustrates what would happen.

The suspension units for all the wheels are automatically and simultaneously blown, so that the bodyshell collapses onto the tyre surfaces, boosting the last-ditch stopping power.