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What's the most innovative solution you've come up with for a tricky engineering problem?

Lisa Miles

As they say on TikTok... I'll go first! Wink

So, I'm not an engineer, but I did come up with a nifty solution to a persistent annoyance.

I used to work for an electronics component supplier as part of the High Security Team. Team members had specific clients and orders that only they could handle. This meant we had a bunch of stickers to apply to items or packaging, and these stickers came on rolls. Imagine having about 10 rolls of different stickers cluttering your desk at any given time. It was a nightmare! You had to peel off each sticker with your fingernails, which meant taking off your gloves (we wore gloves to avoid getting fingerprints on delicate components—I've got another story about that, but I'll save it for later! Sweat smile). Plus, the rolls would unravel and scatter all over the place if you weren't careful.

After getting fed up with constantly rewinding rolls and doing the gloves-on, gloves-off dance, I decided to come up with a solution. Inspiration struck when I saw a box of hole punch reinforcer stickers in the stationery cupboard. The box had a clever design that dispensed the stickers automatically when you pulled down on the backing paper.

I scoured the office for scrap materials and found the perfect box to hold five rolls snugly. I cut two slots in the sides of the box and used a piece of stiff tubing to hang the rolls. I also cut out four circles of card to place between the rolls so they could spin freely without getting tangled. Once I threaded the rolls onto the tubing and hung them in the box, I added two narrow strips of card along the top edge and the front of the box. When the roll was threaded underneath these strips, pulling down on the backing paper would dispense a sticker that you could easily lift off with gloved hands. Problems solved! Blush

My colleagues loved it so much that they 'commissioned' me to make one for each of them too! Smile

So, what's the most innovative solution you've come up with for a tricky engineering problem? I'd love to hear your stories, whether it's a clever hack, a creative workaround, or a full-blown invention! 

  • Mine was to push a plastic sledge, via a set of drain rods taped to it, under the floor of our 'new house', with an LED light to illuminate the way and mobile phone set to video, clipped to the side of a weighted die cast box to see what was happening under the floor.

    When I first gained access under the floor, to attempt to add a telephone extension, there were glistening 'spots' on the under-surface of the floor boards (December). Hence the attempts to video the underfloor /solum.

    Unfortunately it turned out to be the dreaded, long established, slow burn, of 'wet rot'. It hadn't shown up in the house (home report) survey which doesn't lift carpets or have any intrusive checks.

    The video proved handy when getting in tradesmen and estimators who usually didn't have full video of the inaccessible bits.

    You get to be quite an expert on humidity, under floor ventilation, old buildings, 'sealed' solum, dew point, extraction, wall insulation, etc. I even created a simplified psychrometric chart (via details from a CIBSE CPD article), to help explain why/how classical approaches to 'heating' get things wrong for the modern house.

  • in reply to Philip Oakley

    Love that Philip! Slight smile

    I wouldn't have thought of using a sledge! I probably would have attempted something with wheels at first and wondered why it was getting caught up! Joy

  • Many many years ago we entered a team in BBC's "Robot Wars". Rather foolishly I decided to try designing the motor speed controller from scratch rather than buying one, and discovered how hard it is to design a reliable H bridge controller for 24V 800W motors! However I seemed to have finally got it working reliably until the day before the auditions, when the controllers on both motors literally exploded very dramatically.  We had to have the drive working for the auditions, and being mid afternoon on a Saturday there was no way we could get replacement components that day so...I scoured the garage floor (they really had exploded!) to try to recover at least two working transistors and protection diodes, one of my colleagues dashed off to get some contactors (the one thing we did know where to get from a friend locally),  while the other colleague very rapidly re-wrote the software at the other end of the garage, and in a few hours we'd completely redesigned and rebuilt it to be a single transistor speed control with contactors changing the direction. We got through the audition, and used that robot on the telly, in two local fundraising events (raised over £2,000 for Children in Need) and various schools demonstrations for several years all using that rapid bodge up.

    I've designed sound equipment used in the hugest of huge recording studios, and designed patented SIL4 railway signalling products, but in terms of pure speed of innovation that's probably the design where all of us involved were the most impressed by ourselves! Although I'm still embarrassed that I couldn't design a "simple" reliable H bridge in the first place...

    Incidentally, Robot Wars itself was a hive of innovation during the filming - they tried for the telly to give the impression that we were all deadly rivals, but in practice (apart from one or two slightly stand-offish teams) we were all donating bits and bobs to help teams who'd been battered but unbeaten in one round find quick ways to rebuild their machine for the next. I get the impression it got a bit more professional in later years, we were in the very early years when the "robots" were endearingly amateurish and it was great fun.

    Cheers,

    Andy

  • in reply to Andy Millar

    Thanks for sharing Andy! Slight smile I used to enjoy Robot Wars and remember when we had the team with us at the IET stand at the Motorshow in Birmingham some years ago now. 

    Makes me wonder if any of our members have participated in the Red Bull Soapbox or Air races? Would love to hear from some of you! Sunglasses

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