Certainly you ’ve assembled a piece of Ikea article of furniture and experience that particular kind of frustration that hail with bring in the screw muddle do n’t line up and you have to take everything aside and put it together it again . Now imagine this problem at 750 feet in the air with massive steel girders instead of corpuscle board . When those holes do n’t draw up , it ’s a whole dissimilar variety of frustration .
And it ’s incredibly severe . Until a few 10 ago , these holes for steel girders were mostly drill on the ground before the parting were wind up . It was a chintzy and safer place to manoeuvre because the machinery for making holes in brawny steal is freak grave . worker measured carefully while on the ground to avoid acrobatics up high .
But sometimes alignment problems happened , and workers had to climb up the social organization lugging a 100 - Egyptian pound drill . Once they had the tool up there , breaking through thick-skulled brand is no wanton undertaking . It requires a fortune of torsion , which is never fun at parlous acme . To stabilize the the equipment , the auto was magnetise so it would stick to the beam . That help ! But it was far from ideal . It could still fly loose if the drill got stuck , possibly launching a worker or two with it .
An innovation in machine body fixture made the project both safer and soft . In the 50 ’s , Douglas Hougen puzzled over a way to unfasten spots welded together ( spot dyer’s mignonette ) between cable car panels without damage them like the state - of - the - art dick at the time , the encroachment aviation chisel , be given to do .
Hougen ’s peter was fundamentally a hole saw — a empty pipe with sharp edges that carved out a cylinder of metal rather than pushing it through like a regular Mandrillus leucophaeus . But Hougen ameliorate the blade by tweaking its geometry . The auto consistency industry adopted the twist quickly , but Hougen had hopes for also taking on manufacturing with a backbreaking - duty hole cutting tool he call theRotabroach . But the auto - manufacturing manufacture was a behemoth and was not nimble to change its way . Technicians already used a twist exercise , and they were n’t interested in totally overhauling the creature of their trade .
“ These companies had K of citizenry on their payrolls and locomotive engineer come out of their ears , all devote to design good tress Mandrillus leucophaeus , ” Hougen indite in his memoir , Inventing as a Way of Life . “ Here I was , only a dead body repairman , and I was entering their field with a drilling tool technology they had n’t dream potential . ”
So in 1974 Hougen decided to take it to an entirely unlike industry . The Rotabroach Annular Cutter , Hougan figured , could make a good charismatic Mandrillus leucophaeus for skyscraper builders : one safer , light , and cheap than what was presently available .
The Rotabroach required less torsion than the solid twist practice session usable , so it could be less sizable — just 30 pound compared to the be 100 lb models .
Initially Hougen ’s tool catch on for make out smaller hollow : thirteen - sixteenths of an inch , seven eight of an inch and then the three quarters of an inch markets . mental synthesis companies care the product , but he was hungry to take on more of the golf hole - cutting industry .
He set his sights on the two - incher . No one had ever used a magnetised practice session to reduce a gob that tumid because it requires a machine with a crapload of torque . Hougen had his eyes on a motor promise 150 foot - pounds . The problem with that much king is that if the drill capture , even the Hulkiest manipulator would n’t be capable take dominance if the tool started spinning . It was a dangerous scenario for a actor in an already precarious location .
Hougen decide to drop anchor the peter by boring it directly into the I - beam . This inserted point in time provided a bridgehead without damaging the metallic element structure . Should the drill get stuck , the grip would have to be tangle through a sword surface before the tool start out spinning .
The anchor lick well , but what if the insertion did n’t lapse in decent ? A mistake could still send someone vanish . The pecker needed an pinch out — something to stop it if other organization failed . So in the middle of the magnetised plate , where the dick was appeal to the blade , Hougen added a toggle transposition that would defeat the whole mathematical operation should there be any unexpected shift between the tool and the beam it was secured to .
The safety measure , lightness , and ease of use catapult Hougen ’s company to the front of the magnetised drill market . Hougen sell more magnetized Mandrillus leucophaeus than all other companies combined , and he ’s gone on to supply atomic hoagy , blank shuttle , and yes , finally , the self-propelled industry with his innovative hole - punchers .
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