Hi

I am doing a degree in industrial design and trying to come up with projects for my final year. I am a skier and boarder (mainly freestyle) so I thought that designing something for skiers would be pretty fun.

What I’ve come up with so far is to develop a wax iron which feeds in wax as you iron, it would also have a scraper which collects the wax back into the iron for reuse, so you get a nice wax application and waste less wax in scraping.

I was just wondering what peoples thoughts on this were, if you think its a good/bad idea, and why.

Also if anyone has problems that they encounter fairly often which I could come up with a solution to, let me know

Thanks for your help

James

Given that some ski wax contains additives that are harmful for the environment it sounds like an excellent idea both on an environment and cost basis (ski wax is expensive). When I wax skis I generally scraped the excess off and this then gets swept up, there does seem to be a lot of wastage in the process, probably more wax ends up on the floor than on the base. I’m sure feeding the wax would also cut down on wastage. You would have to come up with a design that wasn’t ridiculously expensive to produce.

Sounds like an idea we will see on the BBC’s Dragons Den.

I think to design an Iron that dispenses wax as the Iron glides along the base would be a good idea, but the concept of re-collecting the wax would be very difficult to achieve as alot of the wax ends up over the edges e.t.c, it might be better to concentrate on getting the iron to release less wax or just enough wax to cover the base, at exactly the right temperature to get the base to absorb it, you could research into the ski base to find out how thay react to different temperatures of wax aplication.....also, waxing machines do already exist so you will need to look at these.....good luck!