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

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.

Love that Philip!

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! 

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

Thanks for sharing Andy! 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! 

At my last employer the TV in the kitchen break room was nearly always tuned to the reruns of the Red Bull Soapbox shows. It would be always accompanied with comments along the lines of "why have they done it that way?" or "it would be better if...". There was always the comment "We should do this, we'd make a great team" but it hasn't materialised...yet. I'd love to see them on it and what they would come up with! 

I would absolutely love to see a team of IET members get together and make a team for either the Soapbox or the Air race. I'm sure it would be spectacular! 

I'm pretty sure some of our members were on Scrap Heap Challenge (another one of my favourite TV shows) Andy Millar was that you or someone else? 

One of my colleagues on the Devin and Cornwall LN was on Scrapheap Challenge, shortly after that he and I ran a IET LN Great Egg Race for many years, that was great fun. It was interesting to note how often professional engineers got beaten by school children...

We did discuss at the time having an IET LN soap box race, the challenge was finding somewhere that we'd be allowed to do it! I think it was the IMechE who used to do raft racing down here which was also apparently really good.

That’s a fantastic story and a perfect example of grassroots innovation at its best! You identified a persistent workflow bottleneck, understood the constraints (gloves, limited desk space, delicate materials), and applied a practical, low-cost solution that improved efficiency and reduced frustration. What makes it even more impressive is how you drew inspiration from a completely different domain (office stationery) and adapted the mechanism creatively. Your sticker dispenser hack not only solved a logistical headache but also demonstrated the essence of engineering thinking: optimizing systems through thoughtful design. It’s these kinds of everyday ingenuity moments, solving real problems with clever, resourceful thinking, that truly embody the spirit of innovation.