I'm not sure why I always have to walk through the tool department of every home center I visit. I have all the tools I want and many more than I need, so chances are the plastic is not going to come out in order to bring another one home. I think my primary reason is to see what new tools are going for. Have prices come down? How much difference is there between brands of tools that do the same thing? What do you get for your dollar?
Checking out table saws, I might conclude that you get a lot more for your dollar with the one hundred dollar saw than you do the five hundred dollar saw. You can put a fifty dollar saw blade in a one hundred dollar saw as easily as an upscale product. Compound miter saws are similar. You can cut a compound angle on a board with the one hundred dollar model as well you can with the more expensive sliding kind. Naturally the expensive models are a lot more versatile, are more robust as well and will last many years longer than the less expensive versions and besides, the idea is to buy only what you need to make your life a little easier.
A few years back after scrutinizing a dozen or so products that all had circular saw blades in them, it dawned on me while driving home that there should be a saw that addresses both what the table saw does and the compound miter chop saw does. They each have the same blade and very similar motors providing the same horse power and rpm. Why wouldn't customers want a saw that does both, especially is they have limited floor space for their shops? Maybe it wouldn't cost combined much more than any of the singular dedicated products? Maybe contractors would like the idea as well because of confined working space and the time that would be saved setting up his equipment? I was determined to find out if anything like what I was thinking about was on the market before going into my automatic design mode designing something that was already out there.
I usually start with the internet with my product searches. If it's on the market I can usually find it. I even check eBay thinking it may have been on the market before but not now. And when I'm convinced that the critter has never existed, I start a patent search thinking that if I was thinking about the concept, someone before me had as well and maybe even patented it. I use the Google Search as well as the US Patent and Trademark office search site. The trouble with patent searches is finding difficulty when to stop. If I spend four hours, something always tells me to belly up to the keyboard and spend a few more.
With all designers and inventors, when the juices want to flow you can't control it. The concept starts coming together while doing other things. It's not unusual to wake up with solutions to problems that seemed impractical the day before. I have a table saw and also a compound miter saw and a radial arm saw as well. It was easy to go out to my shop and gather as much information as I liked to get started on the computer. Lots of sketches followed along with many answers to the issues that needed them. I didn't want the depth of the cut to be compromised for either the table saw function or the what was now the compound-miter-radial arm functions. I didn't want any set up requirements when changing over from one function to the other. I didn't want it to be so heavy that it would require two people to load and unload it from the back of a pick up truck. For three days I designed and kept going back to the search engines during design breaks to make sure I wasn't replicating what was already out there. I finished the conceptual study in three days. This wasn't a design that I could send to the shop, but it was representative of what it was gong to look like, including all the major components represented correctly in size and shape. I was convinced that a major tool company would want it. One of them would be my customer because I new developing the dual saw, tooling for it and marketing it was something I would never be able to do financially. But I did know what it looked like, had an idea what it would cost by comparing its complexity to similar existing products and had its function well defined on a filed provisional patent application. In all, I had four very long wintery days into the new product. Or at least what I though was a new product.
I had made some contacts with large tool companies in the past presenting other product proposals they might be interested in co-developing or licensing once I received a utility patent, which I probably would file for even if I didn't have a customer lined up and knew any future patent searches would not yield any conflicts.
I was surprised when I received a phone call from an executive of a large manufacturer I had contacted telling me that "great minds think alike". Yes, there was one on the market being sold in only one European country and his company held the patent. He was kind enough to suggest that my concept might offer more and not to drop it. I took the patent number given to me by the gentleman and input it into the patent office search sight. The concepts were too similar for me to want to continue with mine. I still don't know why I couldn't make it come up during my searches.
If I had spent a thousand dollars to have a competent patent attorney search my idea, I'm sure I would have been presented with the patent that beat me to the idea by only a year or two. I spent thirty two hours of my own time and am smart enough never to equate that to money. It was a fun study and I enjoyed it. It was also a good exercise to enter into by website to show prospective customers how much they can get for only thirty two hours of my time. I always make sure their patent searches are behind them before helping them with definition of their idea.
The executive told me that they were learning that most contractors want one of each kind of saw. They don't want to be bothered changing over regardless of how easy it is.
Their experience as well as mine are both examples of never having enough information before turning the key to start up developing the idea.
A point of interest. When I starting kicking around ideas for a manual drill bit sharpen, I found over seventy five somewhat related patents to sharpening drill bits. The concepts can be different, but if not totally different, obtaining a patent might be difficult. The time to fine out is beforehand, and not after you've invested in a patent only having it disallowed.
