The latest installment of Elegant Solutions is devoted to the subtraction and sustainability elements of elegance.
HANDIBOT
While 3D printing and additive manufacturing is all the rage, Shopbot Tools has brought a truly innovatively subtractive manufacturing tool to market, courtesy of a very successful Kickstarter campaign that raised nearly triple the funding target.
Handibot is a new kind of portable, digitally-controlled power tool for cutting, drilling, carving, and many other machining operations. If you’re familiar with industrial computer numerically controlled equipment (CNC), think of the Handibot tool as a portable version of CNC. But instead of taking material to a stationary machine, you bring the Handibot to your material — your jobsite, your remodeling task, your project, your work.
In other words, it reverses the traditional paradigm, a staple of disruptive innovation.
You can put your Handibot tool to work on a table, the floor, the ceiling, the wall, wherever you need to precisely cut, drill, or carve. Armed with a software application developed just for the kind of job you need to do, a Handibot tool is ready to go to work on your job, task, or project with a squeeze of the “Start” button.
Take a look!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTxZEnj5rls
You can see more videos of the Handibot in action HERE.
LINEAR SCISSORS
Tamas Fekete, a student at the Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design in Hungary on track to becoming a successful product designer with an eye toward designing automobiles, has designed a great tool that solves a common problem: using scissors to cut a perfectly straight line.
“The common problem with scissors is that it is very difficult to cut a long straight on a large paper without premarking the line,” he writes. “For a straight cut one may need to use other tools such as a roll cutter, a cutting knife with an underplate or a ruler and a pencil to mark the line. This scissor was designed to solve this problem by only using a unique shape therefore you don’t have to use other tools at all.
“It operates just like every other scissor but with the horizontally divided handle which encase a right angle it can be fit to the edge of the table. This makes it possible to slide the handle and the blades forward on a straight lane while cutting.
“The handles have a small thickness to easily move them even with the tip of the fingers which is essential when the tabletop is as thick as you can’t put your fingers through the holes. The shape of the handle also diverts the excess material out of the way while cutting which protects the fingers and ease the forward movement.”
HEROBike
Can a simple bicycle made of locally grown natural resources save and sustain a community? In a word, yes. HERO, a non-profit organization serving the Alabama Black Belt, has created an attractive, fun-to-ride bike that uses locally grown bamboo to build bikes, in turn generating new economic development opportunities in the rural town of Greensboro, Alabama.
HEROBike’s Semester model is the product of yet another successful Kickstarter campaign.
Take a look!
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