Heat treatment and thermal control is important in creating the required properties of forged products. This allows relief of internal stresses and grain structure control, which provide improved material properties.

Now that thermography is a commonplace industrial technique, today’s invention is to use this to help control the local properties within forged components. This could be achieved by directing a jet of coolant gas to provide computer-controlled, spot cooling of the hot regions in a forged workpiece (it doesn’t have to use air, if you are concerned about oxidation).

This would allow greater certainty about the local rates of cooling and thus help to form components with varying properties in different regions. A bearing surface could be specially hardened, whilst leaving a defined level of elasticity in the shaft section of a single, multiproperty forging, for example.

This would certainly require very high speed, very narrow gas jets in order to achieve refined cooling within the body of a thick-section component.

I once had a Yamaha motorcycle with wheel spokes which were curved (made of cast aluminium alloy). There was much tutting at the time, in the technical press, that this was an example of form over function.

In view of the fact that lots of today’s bicycles have several springs, swingarms and dampers embedded in their frames, why not just simplify things and use spokes which are inherently springy? Most conventional thinking about spokes says that they should be as rigid as possible; stiffening the wheel to ensure effective ‘feedback’ from the road surface (and limiting fatigue damage).

But what if you want to be transported on a featherbed and don’t much care about performance? As long as the spokes are stiff in the wheel axle direction, they can stand to be pretty flexible radially. This would probably mean that the hub of the wheel remains slightly eccentric when in motion, but to anyone who has tried to ride over cobbles, springy spokes have got some obvious advantages.

I’d suggest making the spokes C-shaped in the plane of the wheel (allowing alternating tension and compression) and with an oval section with its long axis parallel to the wheel axle (to ensure the rim stays coplanar with the hub).

Racing cyclists have resting heartbeats of 32, shave their entire bodies and dress in skintight lycra. These characteristics alone would mark them out as ‘different’ but they are, as a breed, also uniquely fetishistic about their kit. You can pay £700 for a pair of turboflex graphite composite aero blades…without having a clue about why they can cut your triathlon time by 0.0001 sec…you just have to buy them.

Today’s invention is for all those obsessives to whom such cycling minutiae matter.

Given that aerodynamic forces are highly significant, I suggest that one of the most obvious sources of drag are the legs of the rider thrashing up and down. If you don’t want to encase him in a monocoque, then you have to live with that…well, no.

Each leg of the cyclist’s skintight outfit would be equipped with four, tubular air bladders (one for the front and back of the upper and the lower leg). Each of these would lie flat when deflated and when inflated, take up a triangular cross-section -like the trailing edge of an aerofoil.

As the cyclist presses down on the pedal, (ie leg moving backwards relative to the air) some of his effort is used to pump up the bladders on the front of his leg, providing it with a temporary, low form drag configuration. When the foot pressure is released (leg moving forward), the air is transferred to the bladders on the rear of the leg.

This can be accommodated within a standard flexible suit and would also provide an illusion of enhanced muscularity.

Today is the first anniversary of IOTD. I’d like to say thanks to all my readers, especially those who have left comments. Keep watching this space!

For people who still can’t resist the lure of buying books, being able to find the one you want, within a bulging bookcase, can be a daunting task. Even if you can be bothered to sort the damn things alphabetically, every birthday or booksale means another cartload of titles has to be added in the right positions. I’d rather spend the time reading the contents than searching the spines.

Today’s invention is a way to find the book you want, without having to do any manual shelf sorting.

Almost every book now published has a barcode printed on the back. Each time a new book is bought (or a read one replaced), you scan in the barcode using the reader attached to your bookcase.

Each shelf has a narrow strip of continuously barcoded plastic attached across the width of the bookcase. As each book is replaced, it must be set on the shelf so that it stands, for a moment, between its new neighbours and covers a section of the barcode tape, corresponding to the width of the book.

Whilst in this position, the scanner is used to record the sequence on the tape running up to the front of the book and after the back face. This specifies where the book is and is recorded by the system. The book can then be pushed backwards off the tape and into position. This will automatically update the locations of all the books on that shelf (by an amount which decreases with distance from the replaced book).

The tape also carries human-readable numbers so that the system, when asked, “Where is my copy of Ulysses?” can respond “It’s at indicator 20115 in bookcase 3. It was last accessed one year ago. Your library is now 2301 replacements away from alphabetical ordering”.