Reverse Engineering

I’ve still been working on the panel clamp review, and a big part of it can really be considered reverse engineering the product to see what really makes it tick, and when comparing different brands, it also provides a level playing field.

When getting to compare different brands, and having started the reverse engineering process, you also learn a great deal about design in general.  Choice of thread types, diameter, pitch, length, material, bar section, handle length, diameter, pin material, diameter, on and on.

It really is interesting to see the decisions made by the engineers when the clamps were originally designed, and in some cases whether an engineer seemed even involved in the process at all!

I always find I’m disappointed with some products – they promise so much, and fail to deliver, and I just see them as a complete waste of the materials used in their construction. The worst examples of that is often when a product has been reverse engineered, quickly and poorly as so many companies have been doing – rather than actually researching the product’s purpose, they take an existing product and make it as cheap as possible, avoiding the cost of actually using engineers to properly research and design a decent product. Others get the majority of the design right, then forget that there is a need for a human operator!

On the other hand, after looking at a wide range of product, you do formulate a definite wish-list of what you’d want to see in a set of clamps for the shed.

My dream- a wall set of good clamps of a range of sizes (and multiple copies of each size), such as you see on the walls of good workshops everywhere (and particularly on TV / WebTV)!