Invention: Laser-guided edge finder.

An inventor applies for his first patent at 65 – an update to a standard machinist’s tool. He winds up with clients in medicine and aerospace.

(5) My older brother has a genius IQ. He’s like 168 or so. I’m just normal.

(6) He’s the one who talked me into trying college. When I started, I didn’t stop until I had my doctorate. I’ll stick to something if it seems worthwhile.

(7) I got my doctorate in education, specialising in aviation, and I worked for a while on electric vehicles. In most blueprints they’ll say: Find the edge, go in so far, and drill a hole. The typical edge finder that is out there, you put it in your quill, and it has top and bottom parts that rotate independently. You touch it to the edge of the workpiece, and when the two parts spin flush with each other, you’ve found the edge. But before you put in your drill bit, you have to move the worktable again to actually align the centre of the quill with the edge.

(8) I taught at California State University, Fresno. I was watching our students struggle with the edge finder, and I’d been using a laser pointer in the classroom. I thought, ‘Hmm, I wonder if I could mate the two together?’

(9) Call it the direct method: You put our laser edge finder in the quill and move the table until the beam makes a line down the side of the workpiece. You’ve found the edge, that quick.

(10) I filed for a patent. Being that I was already 65, they put you at the top of the list, figuring you may not be around by the time they go through their normal process. Around the same time there was a hobbyist show for machinists in Visalia, just south of us. My wife and I put 300 of our units together. We sold out in hours and spent the next couple days just taking orders. So we knew we had kind of a hit.

(11) In many cases, say, a Boeing machinist reads The Home Shop Machinist magazine, sees our ads, and says, ‘Oh, hey,

we could use that.’ We’ve sold eight different Boeing locations our laser tools. For every wing that’s built, there’s a jig that has two of our units on it. You can imagine a 20-metre-long water-jet table with a carbonfibre, raw-material wing worth about $1.5 million. They use our tool to make sure it’s centred before they commit to cutting.

(12) The applications boggle my mind.

(13) Johns Hopkins medical research bought a red-laser unit from us, and about three days later they called and said, ‘Could you make us a green unit?’, because they wanted to send a green dot out through a fibre-optic cable. The batteries in our units, they’ll go flat in three hours. The same batteries on a green laser? Five minutes. So that’s what caused me to introduce the AC-powered units.

(14) Those are things I would never have thought of, but just working with the customer, finding out what they need, and wondering if I can do it or not – that’s led to new products.

(15) It’s just been leading from one thing to another. Like when the CIA called.

(16) I didn’t ask what they were going to do with it.