Tag: fabby

If you have ever been tempted to change flats in order just to obtain a balcony, today’s invention is for you.

A box about the size of a smallish filing cabinet, but curved, would arrive in the lift. This would be bolted to the floor of your flat and therefater act as a breakfast bar (or bar, full-stop).

When the weather was good, you could throw open a window and extract from the bar, a set of telescoping, circular segments, each with the same u-shaped cross-section.

These would extend outward through the window, forming a sturdy, projecting balcony.

The average Kwik-Tire outlet will attach new rubberwear to your vehicle at a speed to rival an F1 pit crew.

This means however that your wheels will be left in a state of ovality so that even driving on a smooth road, if you can find one, won’t be much fun.

The traditional solution is to pay a bit extra to have ugly zinc weights clamped to your alloy wheel rims. Fine if you own a Rover but not acceptable if you like the wild side of 40mph.

Today’s invention therefore makes use of the otherwise ridiculous bolts which are often found on expensive wheels.

When these are rebalanced, the machine would calculate which bolts could be replaced by those of a heavier material.

You would drive off with one or two of them made with eg tungsten inserts (there would be a range of bolts made with different masses that the machine could select for the required circumferential locations)…Perfact balance but without the ugly (and potentially lethal) clamped-on ballast.

I work on trains a lot and I’m often irritated by the sun shining in on my laptop and making my screen content almost invisible.

Today’s invention is therefore a program which helps with seat booking.

You enter details of the journey including your preference for a table or sitting facing forwards, the preferred angle of your laptop screen and the departure time.

The program then looks up the weather forecast and will evaluate, for every available seat, the angles at which the sun will hit the carriages at numerous positions along the route.

It is therefore just a matter of geometry to indicate those seats which will allow your laptop screen to be most visible for most of the journey.

Today’s invention is a new form of fuel tank for commercial aircraft.

This would take the form of aerodynamically-profiled rings attached to the front of each jet engine. These would increase drag only marginally whilst lessening the dangers associated with pumping fuel.

Tanks would simply clip into place from a truck equipped with a small lift. Less fuel loading time has to be popular with airline schedulers too.

Wings could concentrate on providing lift and the tanks would be much more easily inspected and maintained.

The number of rings would be increased for longer flights and there would still be internal pipework to allow transfer between tanks for trim maintenance.

It’s very hard to land a helicopter safely on a highly non-horizontal surface.

It can be harder still to hold it there, especially if the surface is moving -as in the sloping deck of a sinking ship, during a rescue mission.

Today’s invention is a set of rotor blades which have a larger than usual variation in their angle of attack.

This allows them to be electronically controlled, during the last stages of descent onto some slope, so that the blades, still rotating in the same direction, begin to supply downforce, rather than upthrust.

The aircraft would thus be pinned securely to any surface, making the exchange of material easier. Personnel would have to battle with airflow away from the machine, but in an emergency, that shouldn’t be impossible.

This approach could be modified to allow eg helicopter drones to attach themselves to vertical surfaces if required.

Online shopping still suffers from the need to be present to receive items when they arrive through the post.

Today’s invention makes use of the fact that our streets are full of parked cars…even during normal postal delivery times.

Car owners would mark their house address somewhere on the outside of their vehicles. They would also each buy a barcode scanner kit and mount this facing outwards through a window.

When a post person holds up a package bearing a special code to the car’s scanner, it opens either the bonnet or the bootlid only.

This allows the delivery to be left hidden within the vehicle and easily re-locked.

People in crowds can get hurt when trying to force their way through doorways, eg to escape from a burning building.

Today’s invention is a doorway which reacts to the pressure of a crowd.

In the diagram on the left, the people are jammed in the doorway.

In the right hand image, the door and sidewalls have begun to oscillate slowly backwards and forwards over a small amplitude, thus jiggling the people free from the jam, like sand in an egg timer.

An electric motor would first expand the room, freeing a small number of people, before returning to the normal configuration and repeating the process.

(My eldest daughter has just pointed out that the oscillation might instead be of the door jambs alone, in the plane of the wall).