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Sunday, October 2, 2005
Working with nifty ideas
By MARK I. JOHNSON
News-Journal Staff Writer
NEW SMYRNA BEACH — It began as an off the cuff remark -- a casual conversation between a father and son on an Indiana golf course.
“My dad, Milton, wondered if there was a way to stabilize a putter,” A.J. Johnson said recalling that talk in 1972. “He wanted to make the club more a part of the body.”
Now, 30 years later, Johnson, 63, of Osteen, and his brother, Pete, 67, New Smyrna Beach, have seen the seed their late father planted grow into a design for an innovative putter they hope will lower handicaps on greens across the country.
Sitting in Pete Johnson´s oceanfront condominium management office, the brothers said in more than 50 years on the links, they have used almost every style of putter available. None were able to live up to their father´s concept of fusing the club with its user, so they decided to make one themselves.
“We were talking on the golf course and I was having trouble with my putting. A.J. mentioned the conversation with our father,” Pete Johnson said.
Over the next couple of years -- on the links, at breakfast after matches and chatting over drinks -- a design was hammered out and put to paper.
The concept is simple: A long-handled club with a hinge in the grip that will allow it to ride against the forearm, making the putter an extension of the golfer.
Once they had something down on paper, the brothers turned to South Florida-based Invention Technologies to take it into production.
“A.J.´s son had an invention with them,” Pete Johnson said.
The brothers have a contract with Invention Technologies to market the putter design to manufacturers who could produce it.
“We have had some bites and have applied for a patent,” Pete Johnson said.
A.J. Johnson believes once their putter hits the links, it will be an instant success.
“Golfers are impulse buyers,” he said. “If they think something will lower their handicap, they are going to buy it. They have never seen a club like this.”
The Johnson boys believe their father, who died in 1998, would be proud of what they have done, not because they are making something from his concept but because they were doing it together.
“This is not just one person´s idea,” A.J. Johnson said. “It is a combination of all three of us.”
BOAT PROPULSION
Partnering is a key to another local innovation, this one in the marine industry.
Edgewater boating product manufacturer and inventor Scott Porta met Bill Lawson about six years ago.
At the time, the Ormond Beach engine builder and designer was tinkering with the idea of marrying a marine diesel with existing water jet technology.
As the pair talked, Lawson, 60, said he bounced ideas off his younger counterpart.
The result is Lawson´s JetPac propulsion system. It´s a gasoline or diesel engine with a water jet instead of a propeller, all encased in a fiberglass box that bolts onto the back of a standard boat transom.
“Scott came up with the idea of putting it all in a box,” Lawson said.
That forced him to rethink the power plant configuration. Instead of putting the jet behind the engine, as in other conventional designs, Lawson turned the engine around and mounted the jet underneath.
“It was like fitting the pieces of a puzzle together,” he said.
The stacked concept reduced the overall length, allowing the propulsion system to be used with currently available vessel designs.
“You have a better chance to sell something if you do not have to change the product,” Porta said.
He said the technology Lawson used already existed; it just took someone like him to find a different way to put it together to create something new.
“It is like a Rubik´s cube,” Porta said. “You just change the different faces.”
Lawson and Porta said innovations generally come out of a need to solve a particular problem.
In the case of JetPac, Lawson hoped to eliminate engine stress and inefficiency caused by a propeller drive.
Porta´s first invention -- a hydraulic transom bracket that raises and lowers an outboard motor without changing the angle of the propeller -- came from the same roots.
Porta said he needed a way to use one boat to commercial-fish in both the ocean and shallow backwaters of the Indian River.
One day in the shower, he thought up his bracket and the hinge system that made it feasible. Porta took the idea to an engineer he knew, who tweaked it into a working design.
“My mantra is there are no more one-man bands,” said Porta, 40. “You end up with a better product when you have more minds involved.”
STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY
Sometimes, an innovation is nothing more than applying something old to something new.
Just across the street from Porta´s Dale Street offices, EdgeWater Boat company is using an almost 60-year-old technique, “vacuum infusion,” to build some of its larger boats.
Instead of spraying fiberglass and resin into molds -- a traditional boat-building method -- vacuum infusion flows resin over layers of fiberglass laid into the mold. A “bag” is placed over the fiberglass and a vacuum applied.
The difference in pressure between the outside and inside of the bag draws the resin into the fiberglass cloth, bonding it together. This allows stronger structural integrity, director of manufacturing Jason Gibson said.
“The more fiberglass you have in a boat, the better,” he said. “With the chop gun (spray) method, the glass to resin ratio is 30-70. With infusion it is 70-30 (70 percent fiberglass to 30 percent resin.)”
The process allows for a lighter boat, lowers environmentally-dangerous styrene fumes and provides more consistency in the manufacturing process, he said.
Even with the pluses, few production boat companies use the vacuum infusion, Gibson said.
Cost is one factor, he said. If a mistake is made, the entire boat is a loss. There also are a high number of consumables -- such as the bag and resin tubing -- that must be discarded after each application.
“We do it with our bigger boats because they have a higher margin that can absorb the costs,” he said.
Gibson said when he and company president Peter Truslow learned about vacuum infusion process, they weighed the advantages before taking the idea to their board of directors.
So far, the decision has been a positive one.
“It has performed very well for us,” Gibson said.
Innovations don´t have to be cutting edge technology or use the latest materials. As long as there are people willing to attempt to turn ideas into reality instead of settling for the status quo, new products or techniques will continue to flow to the marketplace.
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