Bring those bright ideas out of the closet
Let’s get the No 8 Kiwi Wire ingenuity to work. Why? Because the economy is improving, and designers and engineers are still hungry for work. You may just scrape in before they are too busy to spend quality time developing your idea. Good ideas and well developed equipment design takes time, and are done better when there is no other pressing work demands. Aaldert Verplanke, mechanical design engineer aaldert@slingshot.co.nz Accountants and bankers may also give you some compelling reasons why it is a good time to invest in productivity improvements and new products now the economy is coming out of a low growth period. As I am not an economist, but a mechanical design engineer, I leave it up to them to convince you. Let’s get the No 8 Kiwi Wire ingenuity to work. We are a nation of inventers For the younger readers I will explain why. In the early days, we were living in isolation so we started finding ways to make machines and products ourselves. As we had few resources, things had to be simple. Import restrictions also contributed to the drive to make it ourselves. We often copied ideas or products from overseas and gave them a Kiwi twist as our requirements were often different from those in Europe or the UK. In the beginning of the 1900’s NZ was one of the most mechanised agricultural economies as the new emigrants were bringing new machines in, but these machines had to be maintained of course and spare parts were difficult to obtain or not possible at all. Thus we made them ourselves. Now, we have about five generations of ‘tinkerers’, and this still shows in the ‘can do’ attitude and the skills that are passed on from trades man to apprentice. LetÕs get back […]